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

by Jonathan Kozol

  At the height of his power, from 1987 to 1992, Calderon was renting sections of the sidewalks to lower-level dealers. “Once the city started moving homeless families here,” she said, “his business was exploding” because so many of those people had already been addicted.

  I’d heard stories about Calderon before, some of them from a former dealer who had rented space from Calderon and who told me that the drug lord ran his operation from a building on a corner of St. Ann’s—which, Ariella said, was only one block from the church.

  “It’s important that you understand that all this was wide-open. People were terrified of Calderon, because he was ruthless if someone didn’t pay him. But in the eyes of teenage boys hanging out there in the streets who saw him in his fancy chains and flamboyant clothing, he was a celebrity. And because the stuff he sold was good, people who were desperate for drugs knew they could depend on him.” When he died—he was shot in 1992, a year before I came there—“he was given something like a presidential funeral right here at St. Ann’s. …

  “Anyway,” she went on, “up until the day he died, Calderon controlled one side of St. Ann’s Avenue. On the other side—I mean, on this side of St. Ann’s in the Diego-Beekmans—there was another group of dealers called the Wild Cowboys. So this is what I mean in saying it was all around us. This is what Armando saw every time I let him out to play and every day when he came back from school. You couldn’t get away from it.”

  Armando was eleven in 1989 when his brother died. “By the time he was twelve, dealers in the neighborhood began to give him small amounts of money.” This was not, she said, an act of generosity or because some of the dealers had been friends with Silvio, although Armando might have seen it in that way. It was a prelude, she explained, to the next stage of entanglement, one in which young people of his age were used to carry drugs for older dealers.

  The reasoning behind the use of children in this role, Ariella said, had to do with the degree of punishment that would be meted out to children, as opposed to grown-ups, who were caught in the possession of narcotics. A dealer who was sixteen years of age or more would, if he were caught, be tried before an adult court. If he was convicted, depending on the circumstances and amount of drugs that he was carrying, he stood the risk of being sent away for a good stretch in prison. A boy of twelve or thirteen, on the other hand, would be brought before a family court, where a hearing would take place and the evidence would be considered. In extreme cases, he might be consigned to juvenile detention. That would be the worst. Far more frequently, he would simply be remanded to his parent or his guardian with a lecture and a warning.

  As a consequence of this, a child of Armando’s age could be very useful to drug dealers at a relatively small risk to himself. Thus it was that, even as his mother was clamping down on him more strictly and severely than she’d done with Silvio, and succeeded for a time in keeping him at home with her at night in the apartment, and making sure he did his homework and that he went off to school each day, Armando nonetheless was growing more familiar with that other world, “the life,” with all the dangers and attractions that it held, which had seemed so glamorous and so exciting to his brother. Before another year had passed, Ariella would discover she was every bit as powerless to keep Armando from the streets as she had been with Silvio.

  At the same time, although his school attendance was much better than his brother’s, the schools in which he was enrolled were among the most deficient in the New York system. At his elementary school, P.S. 65, Armando had been diagnosed with “learning disabilities,” but the school did not provide him with the specialized instruction required under state and federal legislation for a student who had been identified as having special needs.

  “They gave the kids with special needs teachers with no expertise and expected parents to accept this. You know, ‘minority parents don’t make waves.’ And even if you did complain, it didn’t make a difference. … So even though he failed his courses they would pass him on from grade to grade. He wasn’t learning, but they kept promoting him and sent him on to middle school.”

  The middle school he attended—one of two failing schools to which most children in the neighborhood were regularly steered—was no more attentive to his needs than his elementary school had been. But, once again, he was promoted automatically and subsequently sent on to a high school, known as Monroe High, one of the city’s bottom-rated schools, where four of every five kids who came into the ninth grade had been ejected or dropped out before their twelfth-grade year. But even a much better high school would, I’m fairly sure, have found it difficult to make a difference in the way that he was heading by this time.

  “He dropped out a month before the end of the ninth grade,” Ariella said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t know as much as I do now about some of the special schools to which he might have been admitted. So I let him stay at home for the last weeks of the year. At least I thought that I could keep him out of trouble here.”

  But, as she said she should have learned from her experience with Silvio, she realized quickly that her hopes that she could keep him safe at home were, “to say the least, naïve.”

  He never did go back to school. “What I mean,” she said, “is that he wouldn’t stay in school on any routine basis after that.” And, by the time he was sixteen, he was no longer merely an apprentice to the older dealers, serving as their courier. “He was selling” and, she said, “other dealers were recruiting him,” because he was apparently so good at it. “And no matter what I did, he was slipping out at night, sometimes after I had gone to sleep, or if I went out to the store or was at a tenants’ meeting right here in the building.”

  I asked her if she’d thought, prior to this time, of taking out a PINS petition on him, as she’d done with Silvio, but she said, “It didn’t work for Silvio. They couldn’t keep him in the home. If I couldn’t get Armando under my control, I did not believe a group home like the one where Silvio had been was going to change anything.”

  At seventeen, Armando was arrested by police with a weapon on him. “A friend, he said, had slipped a loaded gun into his pocket”—although, because I’ve heard this explanation many times from others who were caught with weapons on them in the street, I had to wonder whether he was telling her the truth. In any case, she said, “When I went to court with him, the judge released him to my custody”—perhaps because it was his first arrest. But this may not have been the favor to him that it seemed, because “within a matter of days he was back there in the streets again.”

  He continued selling drugs but, for now, not using them, at least so far as Ariella could perceive. “He was smoking weed,” she said, but this was so common among adolescents in the area, as it is today with kids of the same age in white suburban neighborhoods, that it didn’t cause her the alarm she would have felt if she thought that he was getting into hard narcotics.

  She had much greater reason for alarm when he was arrested one year later for possession of cocaine and heroin on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was given five years on probation. “But, a few months later, he was tried again, this time on ‘conspiracy to sell,’ and was given four to nine. They let him out in four and a half. When he came out he was a different person.”

  As was the case with Christopher, Armando had acquired a lot more of the skills of criminality while he served his sentence. He’d also gotten deeper into using drugs—“this was while he was in prison,” Ariella emphasized—and not simply selling them. “When he went in, he was smoking weed. By the time that he came home, he was using heroin. He’d become addicted. …

  “It took about a year,” she said, “before I could get him to go into rehab, which he stuck to for a while.” But after a time, instead of shooting heroin, he was drinking heavily, and when he was drinking he’d become combative. “ ‘No one’s going to mess with me or I’m going to kill them.’ ”

>   He was tough but, like his brother, not as tough as he believed. “When he was very drunk one night and offended someone at a party, the guy that he insulted stabbed him in the arm, cracked his skull, and cut off two of his right fingers.”

  Soon after that, he went back to heroin—“using it and dealing it,” she said. He’d been twenty-two when he got out of prison but, because of violations of parole, he was back in prison, or at Rikers Island, seven times during the next four years.

  Ariella told me only recently that Armando had been married while he was in prison, or between his prison stays, and had had two children. Looking back, she wondered if this might have been his ultimate salvation. His wife had never given up on him. “She was constant in her loyalty. She had known him since she was thirteen. When he came back from his final sentence, she was there to make a home for him.”

  While he’d been in prison in the years when he kept breaking his parole, she had brought the children with her when she’d gone to visit him. The older child was a boy, whom I never got to know. The other was a little girl, whose name is Inocencia and whom I’ve met several times, a three-year-old when he was serving his last sentence. “When they came to bring him back to jail that final time, it happened to be on the baby’s birthday. They took him away in front of her before she had her party. …

  “He swore to me he’d never be away again for another of his children’s birthdays. I don’t know what it was. The look on her face, a child’s face? A sense of shame that he had let her down again? I think that something changed in him from that day on.”

  It would not be accurate to say that, since Armando came home to the South Bronx after his last stay in prison, he has made an easy and untroubled readjustment to life on the outside. As a former convict and with the limitations of his education, he has found it difficult to obtain the kinds of jobs that can support his family. He and his wife have been evicted twice from their apartment. One of those times, the family landed in a homeless shelter. The second time, Ariella moved them into her apartment for a year until they could get a new apartment of their own.

  During that year, Ariella said, she had some lengthy conversations with Armando’s wife, who had been on welfare since the children had been born. “I told her, ‘Get off welfare. You don’t need it. You can get a decent job. Let Armando be the one who takes care of the children. Let him be the household parent for a while. Let him learn to be a father.’ ” She said that she was hoping this would be a way for him to learn responsibility and that his wife, meanwhile, could break out of the welfare trap and find out what it’s like to have some economic independence of her own.

  “She went out and got a job at Staples. Then she went to Whole Foods. She’s been working there five years. …

  “I’d like to see Armando get into a good job of his own. For now, he does some part-time work, but his real job is his family. He’s always home before the kids come back from school. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t put himself into positions that are going to cause problems. Inocencia is nine years old. She has a little laptop and she’s teaching him the way to use computers. She teases him because, you know, she’s very smart and little kids don’t find it hard to pick up on computers. It’s not quite as easy for her father. …

  “Armando,” she said, “survived somehow. He lives for his wife and children now. He tells me that he feels a sense of peace at last. That’s something I don’t think he’s ever felt since he was young boy.”

  – IV –

  There’s one further chapter to this story.

  Ariella has two younger boys. I’ve known them both for many years—one of them, the older of the two, whose name is Stephen, more closely than the other. He was in the second grade when I met him at the afterschool at St. Ann’s Church, where I used to tutor him whenever I was there for an extended time, and often saw him also at his public school. Ariella had learned a great deal more by now about the local schools. So, instead of sending Stephen to P.S. 65, the elementary school to which the older boys had gone, she was able to enroll him in a better elementary school a couple blocks away, known as P.S. 30.

  One of his teachers told me that, at first, he was “a lot to handle,” because his moods tended to be highly changeable. He was easily distracted, and distracting to the other children, at some moments in the day. At other times, he’d withdraw into himself and would have a look of sadness in his eyes.

  One afternoon, when I was with him at St. Ann’s, we went into the sanctuary with a slightly younger boy who was also at the afterschool. Stephen looked up at the stained-glass windows that portrayed the Stations of the Cross and his eyes filled up with tears.

  “I know someone up there,” he said softly.

  The other boy asked him, “Who?”

  “My brother Silvio,” Stephen replied.

  The younger child patted Stephen on the arm until he had stopped crying.

  This was at a time when Stephen was going on the weekends with his mother to the prison where Armando was incarcerated. “He did go through some times of deep depression,” Ariella told me. “There was a good psychiatric center for young children at Mount Sinai Hospital. So I made him an appointment there”—which was an act of more aggressive intervention on her part than she had taken with the older boys, because Mount Sinai was not in the Bronx and it was believed by people in her neighborhood to be a place that served primarily the white and middle class, which may perhaps have been an accurate impression. But Stephen received good treatment there, and his depression dissipated greatly over the next years.

  When he finished elementary school, Ariella took no chances on the middle school Armando had attended. Instead, she got him into a less violent and more successful school at some distance from their home where he wouldn’t be subjected to the same peer pressures as his older brothers were. He went on to high school, where he became more social and outgoing than before. He didn’t study as much as he should but managed to get reasonable grades, although she added that she thought the teachers there were “fudging grades to make the school look better than it was.” In any event, he buckled down enough to graduate on time and went to a two-year college, but broke off his studies for a while and worked as a tutor at St. Ann’s. He’s planning now to return to college because he has a more specific sense of motivation than before. He’s developed a compelling interest in the field of criminology with a focus upon counseling and mentoring young people before they get in trouble with the law.

  Ariella’s youngest son, a serious boy, is in his final year at high school now. Ariella brought him up to Cambridge to visit me last winter. He’s very bright and studies hard. His grades are good. He wanted to see Harvard University. He doesn’t open up to me as easily as Stephen does. He keeps his feelings to himself, but I know that he has high ambitions.

  After Ariella’s bad experience with the church that wouldn’t bury Silvio, she’s become an active and committed member of St. Ann’s. Reverend Overall provides her with an office there from which she does outreach work to other parents in the Bronx. Three years ago she was given grant-support by an Episcopal foundation in New York to organize an anti-gun and anti-violence campaign. Working with a number of existing groups of activists and parents in the area, she helped produce a stirring piece of video in which mothers speak about the losses of the children whom they could not save.

  Projects of this nature, and efforts to reach out to influential and supportive sectors in the mainstream of society, have come to be her dedication. She speaks from time to time at universities and colleges. “I spoke at New York University,” she told me recently. “The students wanted to find out how anybody could survive on $16,000 in New York, even twenty years ago!”—which she said “was not the subject I had planned to speak about.”

  She holds her own effectively with people in the world of academia. “I don’t need a Ph.D. to talk about the things I
know. I’m not intimidated by professors when they question me. I can handle their linguistics and gymnastics.” When they ask her “how to stop the violence” but, she says, “don’t want to hear about the way they put our kids in neighborhoods that are most violent already—you know, ‘put them in the fire, then tell them to stop burning’—I don’t let them throw that at me. I know what an oxymoron is. I’m not afraid to answer.”

  Still, for all her reestablished confidence, Ariella lives with memories that no mother who has lost a son, and nearly lost another, can ever put out of her mind. She was not as nearly indestructible as I had initially imagined. She was broken by the death of Silvio. It took her many years to regain her equilibrium and, even then, she could not save Armando from the troubles that he underwent. But she’s done a good job with the younger children and she tries to be of service to her neighbors.

  I find I like to talk with her as often as I can. It feels to me as if I’m standing with her on a very solid piece of ground after a tornado’s passed. Strength, it seems, in somebody who had a lot of courage to begin with, can at last renew itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  Alice Washington:

  The Details of Life

  This will be a different kind of story.

  Alice Washington was forty-two years old when I got to know her in the Martinique Hotel. Like most others who were in the Martinique, she had been projected into homelessness, not by a single crisis (as, in Ariella’s case, a fire in her home), but by a combination of intertwined events that she had to cope with almost simultaneously.