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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Mr. Schuster managed to clean up his image at a later time by making contributions to important Democratic politicians, some of them strong advocates for the very people he had treated with contempt and whose lives he had imperilled—Hillary Clinton, Richard Gephardt, and John Kerry, among others—or by giving parties to raise funds on their behalf, which won him a degree of prominence in Boston’s social pages.

  Ariella was fortunate that her own apartment building was not a part of Mr. Schuster’s complex. But virtually all her neighbors did live in those buildings and no one in the area could totally escape the atmosphere of danger that was ever present in that vast expanse of housing. “Some people did lead reasonably stable lives in the Diego-Beekmans,” Ariella said. “Some kept their spirits up, decorated their apartments nicely, gave their kids a good sense of security, and protected them from getting into risky situations. I think it was much harder for the families that had come out of the shelters. You just can’t put that many people who are shaky and unstable, and children who are loaded with a lot of pent-up anger, into a single neighborhood without it having some effect on almost everyone.”

  This, in any case, is her own portrayal of the world in which she now set out to make a new home for her family.

  – II –

  Once Ariella moved into the neighborhood, she had quickly taken steps to find a job that could support her family. When she was younger, she had worked in entry-level jobs in office buildings and in sales and marketing. With this background, she was able to obtain a sales position at a chain of children’s stores and subsequently worked for two large chains of clothing stores in which she began in merchandising but in time moved on to supervisory positions. One of the jobs she liked the most was for a chain of army-navy stores in which she began in sales but later was promoted to an office job and worked directly with the owner of the company.

  When we met in 1993, she was earning $16,000 yearly. As low as this may sound to anyone who knows the cost of living in New York, it was twice the average family income in Mott Haven, which, as I have noted, was about $8,000 at the time. She joked with me that, by the standards of the neighborhood, $16,000 made her feel like she was “almost middle class.”

  As soon as she’d begun to work, she used whatever money she had left, after she had paid for food and clothes and for her share of rent, to compensate her children in every way she could for the years of homelessness they had been through. One of her boys, Silvio, was twelve years old when they moved into the neighborhood. Armando, the younger boy, was nearly nine.

  “On the weekends, I would dress them up and take them to Manhattan. I took them to museums. I took them to concert halls. I took them out to restaurants. There was a nice one, The Sign of the Dove, somewhere on Third Avenue, that wasn’t too expensive. …

  “I wanted them to see everything I’d never had when I was a child and I wanted them to know that they could have this someday if they did their studies and did not drop out of school and, as I hoped, someday went on to college. I wanted them to understand that life as they were seeing it around them in the neighborhood did not necessarily have to define them.”

  She was hopeful at the start that this was having some effect upon their way of thinking of the future, but she realized before long that the efforts she was making to expand their cultural exposure—precisely what so many educators recommend to parents of an inner-city child—were too episodic, and too far detached from the world in which they led their ordinary lives, to counteract the tide of violence and drug-related wildness that was sweeping through the area.

  In the case of Silvio, who was old enough to have experienced more keenly than his brother the sordidness and stigma of a setting like the Martinique, who had looked into that “cesspool,” as she’d called it, and seen the patterns of behavior and defensive strategies that festered there, Ariella found it very difficult to eradicate the imprint this had left upon his image of himself and the way he looked upon his options in the years ahead of him.

  “Even when my situation had become more stable, he could not regain his own stability,” she said.

  “I was working full-time now. My boss had moved his office to New Jersey. He’d been robbed too many times here in the Bronx. So I had a long ride to get to work each day. I had to take the Number 6 train to get to Grand Central. Then I took the shuttle to Times Square. Then I took a bus on New Jersey Transit at the Port Authority and, after that, I had to get another bus to get to our office. It could take an hour and a half from the time I left my home until the time I got there.

  “Coming back could take even longer because, at night after a certain hour, one of the buses wasn’t running. So I was getting home too late to keep an eye on Silvio after he got out of school. I wasn’t there to watch him. …

  “He started gathering a group of friends around him. He was in the fifth grade, still in elementary school, because he’d missed so much of school when we were in the shelters. His teachers were complaining about his bad behavior. He was causing havoc at the school. He was breaking exit signs, smashing doors, smoking weed when he was in the bathroom.

  “By the time he got to middle school he was having sex. He was a handsome boy and looked older than he was. And the girls were drawn to him. He started stealing. Little things at first. Then bigger, more expensive things. He’d give presents to the girls. Then he’d steal things from their homes. He got away with it. It seemed as if he thought he could do anything he liked. He thought he was invincible.”

  She asked if I remembered an old movie, Scarface, that starred Al Pacino as a refugee from Cuba who became a powerful drug dealer in Miami. “Silvio loved that. Fancy cars. Swanky clothes. Money! And the jewelry! The glamour and excitement of the life within the streets, and the power that went with it.”

  Not long after that, she said, “he started stealing stuff from me as well, right out of my bedroom. Money I had hidden in my bureau—which I would have given to him if I knew he needed it.” And, although she said she hated to see other parents striking their own children, “I was scared I might do it too, and would really hurt him because, no matter what I said to him, or how many times I said it, I realized that I couldn’t hold him back.

  “One day, when I had just been paid, he took my entire salary and cashed it on his own. There were people who would do that for you if you knew the place to go. … I lost all my self-control. I gave him a real beating.”

  At last, she did what other parents in the neighborhood were sometimes forced to do when they saw a child falling out of their control. She filed a legal document known as a PINS petition—the acronym means “person in need of supervision”—so that she could send him to a group home where he’d be protected, or so she believed, from the trouble he was courting by the recklessness of his behavior.

  “When I went to visit him on family day, he’d be screaming at the staff. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you too!’ They’d have to restrain him. They told me once, ‘He’s lucky this is family day.’ Otherwise, they would have treated him more harshly.”

  Within two months, he was begging her to bring him home. “ ‘Mom,’ he’d say, ‘Take me out of here. I’m going to kill myself if I have to stay.’ ” She waited another month, but after it became apparent that they had no power to control him there—“he was growing more defiant than before”—she threw up her hands at last and brought him home with her.

  “It was August by that time, just two weeks before his fourteenth birthday. When school began, I went up and had a long talk with the counselor. And I talked with Silvio at night. Every night. And I wasn’t pulling punches with him. I was being strict with him.” For a while, she believed that he was calming down.

  “Okay. October. He wasn’t showing up at school. He began to steal again. One night he stole my pager. This was long before I had a cell phone, so the pager was important to me for my job. And I also needed it in case
his brother had to reach me while I was at work. …

  “That night, he was riding in a car with a group of older boys. One of them grabbed the pager from him. He told him, ‘Give it back.’ He said it wasn’t his—it was his mother’s. But the boy refused. Silvio reached out and tried to grab it from him,” which, she said, in that situation, “was not a good idea.” The boy that he was fighting with was holding a box cutter in his hand. “When Silvio reached out again, he slashed away at Silvio. He sliced his face apart.”

  Ariella wasn’t certain how he got out of the car. “But,” she said, “it couldn’t have been far from here. When I saw him at the door, he had his hands across his face. When he took his hands down I could see the blood all over him. They had to give him sixty-seven stitches at the hospital to put his face together.”

  I told her that I would have thought this would frighten almost any kid enough to stop him cold or at least make him far more cautious. But, she said, it didn’t work that way with Silvio. “The scar, to him, was like a badge of honor. On Halloween, we were at my sister’s house. He told my sister, ‘Look at me. I’m Scarface.’ ”

  After that, she said, “I had to put him back into the home. But they still could not control him. He would run away from there any time he had a chance. It wasn’t like a lockup. There weren’t any gates or bars. The only thing the guards could do was put you in restraint if you acted violent or threatened someone else. They’d wrestle you down to the ground and twist your arms behind your back. But it was easy to get out at night. And he always knew there were people he could stay with.

  “One night when he ran away he came to the apartment. I sat him down and talked with him. I told him he was going with me in the morning to enroll in a new school. He didn’t put up any disagreement. He was in a quiet mood and he seemed to open up to me a little more than usual. He promised he would try to change. I cooked him a good dinner, one of the things he loved the most, steak and rice and pigeon peas. We talked some more. He seemed happy to be home. So, that night, I was hopeful.”

  But, as Ariella told me later, “I must have known even then that I was grasping at a straw.” The reassuring conversation they had had turned out to be the calm before a storm. “Two nights later, at around ten-thirty, he told me he was going out, because he said he needed something at the corner store. I told him, ‘No. I don’t want you out there at this hour.’ Only a moment after that, while I was in my bedroom, he was out the door.”

  According to one of the boys who hung out with Silvio, he did, in fact, go up to the corner store to buy himself some cigarettes. Then, however, instead of coming back to the apartment, he and his friend walked up to the station at Brook Avenue, where they met some other friends, and they took the Number 6 train down into Manhattan. Then they caught another Number 6 train, this one coming back in the direction they’d just come from.

  “This time, however, when they got back to the Bronx they did not get off at Brook, but continued riding—past Brook, past Cypress, past St. Mary’s, and they kept on going. …

  “These were the old trains,” Ariella said when she was explaining to me what had happened next. “The connectors in between the cars were something like a metal lattice that the kids could climb on. A lot of kids were doing this, climbing up between the cars to get onto the roof, then lying flat and riding through the tunnels, which was known as ‘surfing’ and was a crazy thing to do, and very, very dangerous.

  “But Silvio was fearless. Two of them were lying down but two of them were sitting up, and one of them was Silvio. It was like a game of chicken. Who would take the biggest risk? Which one was the bravest?

  “One of them was sitting on the front edge of the car, so he was facing forward. The other one, Silvio, was on the back edge of the car ahead, so he was facing backwards.

  “There are two bridges over the tracks in between two stations. One of them is Whitlock. The other one is Elder. The first bridge is higher than the second one. He lowered his head and got past it safely. The second bridge came up fast, but he didn’t know this. He lifted his head and waved to his friends. The steel girder struck his skull. His body fell headfirst between the cars.

  “One of his friends pulled him in and held his arms around him. He said his body was convulsing. One of Silvio’s hands shook twice. Then, his friend said, he stopped moving.

  “He was fourteen and three months. I later learned that he had died at 5:58 a.m. …

  “A detective was at my house at eight. When I heard him knocking, I thought it was Silvio. I’d been worried all night long. I said, ‘I’m going to give him the beating of his life!’

  “When I opened the door the officer was standing there with two frightened-looking boys. They were staring at me with this look of horror in their eyes. One of them had drops of blood all over him. He was the one who’d been holding Silvio. But he was too scared to talk. The officer let the boys go home. Then he asked me, ‘Are you Mrs. Patterson? Do you have a son named Silvio?’ ”

  When she answered that she did, the officer asked if she had someone she was close to, because, she said, “he didn’t want to tell me this while I was all alone.

  “I told him I had no one there except my son Armando. He was getting dressed for school. So I asked the officer to come into my bedroom. That was when he told me.”

  After the officer had done his best to comfort her, and given her instructions about going to the morgue, because the body had to be identified, she told me, “I was on ‘automatic’ for a while. I sent Armando off to school. I couldn’t cry. I was numb. I sat there on the sofa and was staring out the window. ‘What have I done? What do I do?’ I called a friend. She wasn’t home. I called my older sister, Ana. I went there to her house. But I couldn’t talk to her. I ran outside to her backyard. It was raining. Finally, she came out and made me come inside.”

  Her sister, she said, “was good to me. She held her arms around me. She made me drink a cup of tea. Then she brought me back to my apartment.”

  Soon after that, she said, her younger sister came. Then co-workers from her job arrived. “I was fortunate that the man I worked for was compassionate and kind. He came directly to my house and handed me the money I would need to bury him.

  “Then my sisters took me to the morgue. Then they took me to pick out a casket. Then I had to find a church that would do the burial. The Catholic church that I attended said they couldn’t do it. They told me that I lived in the wrong zip code. I’d been there a week before to pray to God to help me. But they wouldn’t bury him.” She had to find another Catholic church so she could have a funeral for Silvio.

  Her mother, she said, offered her no comfort. “The first thing she told me when I said that he had died? ‘It’s your fault—for having him.’ She’d never been a mother to me. But from that time on I hated her.”

  For a long while after that, she said, “I hid from myself. I turned my feelings outward—into anger. I was angry at God, angry at the Catholic church, angry at my mother.” In the end, however, she turned her anger inward and was forced to ask herself if she was, in fact, to blame for never having found a way to save him from himself. All the early efforts she had made, the visits to museums and concert halls and restaurants and other nice and interesting places in Manhattan, all those efforts to expose him to some of the normal things that children in the safer and less troubled sections of New York might ordinarily enjoy—was there ever any chance at all that this would make the slightest difference for a boy who’d seen what he’d already seen and whose chosen avatar of the triumphant and exciting life had been a movie character, who came to his own demise, as it happened, in a hail of bullets, by the name of “Scarface”?

  “That movie was a curse to him,” Ariella said. But it was not the only curse, as she knew well, which is why she kept on questioning herself.

  – III –

  Ariella’s capabi
lity for level-headed thinking was badly shattered by her guilt and sorrow about Silvio. But even as she struggled to dig out of the depression she was in, she had to make the best decisions that she could for her surviving son.

  “I kept my job but cut my hours so that I could be here with Armando from the time that he got out of school. My biggest worry now was how his brother’s death was going to affect him.”

  Armando, she reminded me, had still been very young when they were in the shelters. “He hadn’t seen the things that Silvio had seen or, if he did, he was still too innocent and young to have ‘connected’ with them.” So the time when they’d been in the Martinique and similar hotels, she felt, had not affected him directly. “The influence was indirect. He learned things from his brother. …

  “He was always hand-in-glove with Silvio. He looked up to him. And more and more, once Silvio began to win his stripes among the kids he knew here in the Bronx, he saw him as a leader, as a kind of hero to the boys who hung around with him.”

  Silvio, as she had said, thought he was invincible. “Armando had believed this too. And even after Silvio was gone, he still held on to this idea somehow. His brother, in his mind, was still indestructible.”

  Ariella wanted him to give up this idea. “I needed him to understand that Silvio was not the hero he believed. His brother had destroyed himself. But I was not my normal self. My guilt was eating me alive. So, even though I was there with him more than I’d been with Silvio, I wasn’t there in the way Armando needed me to be.

  “Meanwhile, we were still in the same neighborhood. Drug use, which was bad already, was increasing at the time. The biggest drug lord was a very scary guy whose sister was a friend of mine when I was in school, before he started selling drugs—or, anyway, before I knew that he was selling them. He was named George Calderon. His sister’s name was Lourdes, but people called her Sugar. Later on, she got a good job as a clerk at Lincoln Hospital. She seemed like a nice person.” It was not until her brother took over the area, Ariella said, that she realized that her friend was in the business with him, “although I guess it isn’t so surprising when you realize how much money he was taking in.”