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

by Jonathan Kozol

  The following day, I was at the St. Ann’s afterschool, then flew back to Boston and did not get home until rather late. I went to bed and didn’t check my phone until I woke up the next day. When I did, there was a message from her scolding me for having let a day go by without reporting in.

  “Did you get home? Are you okay? You didn’t call. Did you get any sleep? Did you go and see your mother? Did you eat your dinner? Did you remember to tell Martha what I said about her phone? The answer better be ‘yes’ to all of the above. Please call me when you get this.”

  It was in keeping with her authoritative style and her protective nature to talk to me like that, as if she were my parent, even though I was slightly older than she was. More than a year later, in the fall of 1994, when my mother, who was nearing ninety, had to undergo a surgical procedure, Alice went out and bought a card with pink and yellow roses growing on a garden gate in front of a small cottage with a gabled roof and asked if I would give it to my mother. “I know this is a hard time for you and your mother. If I could take away your worries, I would do it with no questions asked. No one lives forever and I know that no one else can ever take your mother’s place. Whatever happens, you will always know you have me. …”

  In the spring of 1995, however, Alice called me on the phone and told me she was in the hospital again. I was lecturing in California at the time and could not be there with her. But she said that cancer cells had been detected in the pleura of her lungs—the protective membranes that lie between the lungs themselves and the tissue and bone structure that surround them.

  “They gave me a procedure called a pleurodesis. It was the longest thirty minutes of my life. It felt like somebody was stabbing me.”

  But three days later, when she called me from the hospital again, she no longer seemed to be in pain, and certainly she didn’t sound as if her spirits had been beaten down. As sick as she was, her old satiric sense of the absurdities of certain situations had obviously not abandoned her. She told me, for example, about a man, a patient on her floor, who set off a fire alarm by smoking in his bed. When I asked her how a patient thought that he could get away with smoking in a hospital, she laughed and said, “They do! They do it all the time. If somebody catches them, they just go down the hallway to a room where they don’t think that anyone will know. …

  “You see,” she said, “the hospital’s not staffed the way it’s s’posed to be. You know the deal. Weekend’s worst. There’s hardly anybody here.”

  I asked if she was feeling well enough to eat.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “I am. I had an appetite today. I ate a piece of fish, some beans and broccoli, part of a potato, and some kind of pudding for dessert. … Doctor says I’ll be here for another week.”

  The next day, she was sounding energized again and was still complaining about problems with the staff. “They was supposed to give me tests this morning, but it was a madhouse here today, so I think that they forgot. When my doctor comes tonight, I know he’s going to break some eggs because he doesn’t take no crap like that from anyone.”

  “Neither do you,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I don’t. I never did, and I’m not starting now.”

  Two weeks later, I was in New York. Alice was home from the hospital but she wasn’t strong enough to try to cook a meal, so I bought some things I knew she liked at the market opposite the train. After we ate and after she made coffee, she said she felt like having something sweet, so we had ice cream for dessert.

  The following day, when I came back to visit in the afternoon, she was in a much more lively mood. As weakened as she’d been by the pleurodesis, she said she felt like getting out and going for a walk. Once we’d gone a block or two along East Tremont Avenue, she suggested that we visit with Pietro and the girls, whom she had known since they were children in the Martinique.

  “They’re pretty girls—and gettin’ tall. They got those beautiful long legs. Pretty figures. Wavy hair. I meet Miranda at the store sometimes. He tries his best, but you can see she don’t got much to wear. …”

  Grandma and Pietro were at home when we arrived but we didn’t get to see the girls because they were still at school. I hadn’t told Pietro I was in New York so he was surprised to see us at his door. He joked with me, as he used to do, about the Red Sox, who, as it happened, were doing well at that point in the year. Still, as I’ve noted, he seldom missed the opportunity to make amusing comments on the rivalry between our teams. It was a bond between us that he very much enjoyed.

  Alice remarked, after we had left, that Pietro did an awful lot to try to give the girls a safe and normal life with the little money that he had, but she also noted that he and the children lived closer to the edge of total destitution than any other family in the neighborhood she knew. She liked Pietro. She did many things to help him in the last years of her life. Even when she wasn’t feeling well enough to visit him, she would send a message to the girls to come up to her building so that she could take their measurements. Then she’d send the information on to me so that I could buy them what they needed at a store in Boston.

  She would give precise instructions too. When cold weather came that year, she said they needed winter coats. “See if you can find them something pretty but conservative. Dark colors. Navy blue or gray in a good woolen fabric would be nice. …” She was like that. He was grateful. When she died he wept for her.

  Alice’s health appeared to be much better during those winter months, although periodically she would have discomfort in her chest and she saw her doctor several times when she developed a low fever once again. Now and then, she’d have a spell of coughing and would need to use a vaporizer or inhaler of some sort in order to relieve her of congestion. But her appetite was good and, when I called her in the evenings, she would always tell me what she’d had for dinner.

  One day when I was there, she told me there was something that she needed on East Tremont Avenue and asked if I would go with her. After we had passed the market next to the train station and crossed the street beneath the tracks, which are elevated in that section of the Bronx, she stopped in front of a boarded building next door to a pizza shop. She had told me more than once that she was smoking marijuana sometimes to relax. Her doctor was not opposed to this, she said, but was not allowed to prescribe it for her legally.

  I went into the building with her, where a man with graying hair and wearing red suspenders was sitting at a table in a dingy-looking room, watching a TV. He disappeared into the back part of the building and came back a moment later with a paper bag for which she paid five dollars. Walking up the street after she put the paper bag into her purse, she said, “He’s been there in the same spot for as long as I’ve been living here.” I got the sense that she derived a certain kind of satisfaction from the fact that she could do things like this in my presence and had no concern that it would bother me.

  As we headed back to her apartment, she indicated other buildings on the street where drugs of different kinds, she said, were usually available. When we approached a group of men who did not look friendly and who partly blocked the sidewalk—there were always men like these, seemingly unoccupied but with alert looks in their eyes—she ran me down on who they were: “Don’t worry. They won’t bother us. The short one thinks that he’s some kind of gangster, but he’s harmless. Besides, I know his mother. …” As we came up beside them, she said, “Hi!” and “How you doin’?” And one of them nodded politely in return.

  She had no hesitation about walking with me in the streets or going to a store with me, no matter what the hour. But if she learned that I was in the neighborhood by myself at night, she’d make it clear that this disturbed her greatly. Similarly, on other nights, if she knew that I’d be up on Cypress Ave or Beekman Ave with one of the families of the children in that area, and if I didn’t phone her when I got back to Manhattan, sh
e would tell me the next day that she was up late looking at the clock.

  Alice’s worries about my safety in the streets, although they were sincere—she did get worried if I promised I would call and then forgot—were, in reality, something of a game she played with me, because I’d walked these streets for years, much as I’d walked the hallways of the Martinique at the time when she was there. Far more important, as I knew she understood, were my worries about her and the problems that I had to deal with back in Boston that concerned my mother and, especially, my father, whose deepening confusions were indications of the rapid onset of dementia. When I was obliged at last to move him to a nursing home, Alice was compassionate for my father’s sake, although, as a woman, she identified more closely with my mother, who was now alone at home except for a companion who looked after her.

  In spite of all the frightening uncertainties that Alice had to live with, she never lost her generous serenity in helping other people who had problems far less serious than hers. I told her once, after I had visited my father in the nursing home and he asked me wistfully if it was “time yet” for me to take him home, that I had trouble sleeping and found it hard to focus on my work. I told her that I wondered if I ought to see a therapist.

  “I don’t think you need to see a therapist,” she said. “I think you need to spend more time with me and with the children at St. Ann’s. I always see how much it cheers you up to be with them.”

  The following day, she mailed me a big envelope containing half a dozen bags of herbal tea and a picture of a sleepy-looking bear, with a red hat on his head, that she had cut out from the box in which the tea bags came. “You don’t need no therapist,” she wrote. “Drink this tea. Drink it to your heart’s content! My love, as always, to your mother. …”

  A year after she had undergone the pleurodesis, Alice’s doctor told her that the cancer for which he’d been treating her, and which had appeared at first to be arrested, had in fact metastasized into a more serious malignancy. Alice’s left breast had to be removed. She didn’t say a word about this to me in advance. I think it was a matter of her wish to get it done, to bring things to completion, to be finished with the surgery before she felt prepared to speak of it.

  “The growth was as hard as a rock,” she told me, once she had recovered from the surgery and called me from her home. “It was more than they expected. I was awake. Well, I was half-awake. They call it ‘twilight anesthesia.’ Then they bandaged me. It’s very tight. So now I’m here at home.”

  I asked if she was taking a painkiller.

  “Yes,” she said. “They gave me Tylenol with codeine—and some Percocet.” When the pain was very bad, she said, “my doctor said that I could take the Percocet.”

  “Do you have an appetite?”

  “Surprisingly, I do. I ate a lamb chop last night with some buttered sweet potato—piece of melon for dessert.”

  She complained about the melon, which, she said, was hard and didn’t have much taste. “You can’t find good melon now. I don’t know why. The ones they got are mostly shriveled and look sick. Same with the cucumbers. I don’t see why anyone would buy them.

  “I wanted to make a salad, but they want too much for lettuce. Lettuce is two dollars. Fresh tomatoes are $1.39. …

  “So, anyway, I’m trying to take it one day at a time.”

  Over the course of the next six months, Alice had to go back to the hospital for further treatment as a regimen of chemotherapy began. Each time she was there I could tell when she was starting to feel better because she’d begin to criticize the food that they were serving her. She’d also tell me stories, usually good-natured ones, about somebody that she liked, or didn’t like, who was a patient on her floor.

  “I got another patient in my room with me right now,” she told me one night on the phone. “An elderly woman, eighty-three years old. She’s having a hard time. Called for her bedpan for an hour yesterday. When the nurse showed up, she said a couple words I didn’t think a lady of her age would know.

  “I had to help her open her milk carton for her lunch today. She does pretty good for somebody her age. She tells me that she lives alone. Her sister lives downstairs. She’s Jewish—did I say that? Still lives in the Bronx but says there isn’t any synagogue up there in her neighborhood no more. You know, Jonathan, there ain’t no synagogues around here anywhere no more. …”

  As almost always, she asked about my mother. I told her she was doing well. “Give her a kiss for me,” she said. “Here’s one for you. God bless.”

  I was traveling again that year and didn’t have a chance to get into New York as frequently as I would have liked. But Alice and I kept in touch by phone and I saw her several times when she was at home.

  By early winter—it was the end of 1996—bottles of pills, assembled like a military force, occupied almost one quarter of her kitchen counter. More bottles, related to her HIV infection, were inside her refrigerator door. Once, at her request, I copied down the names of all her medications. The list of medicines, with jagged-sounding names including many consonants in awkward combinations and other nearly unpronounceable discordant sounds, took up more than half a page. I’m not certain why I kept this list, or why she asked me if I would. Maybe, for my own part, writing out the list and then updating it from time to time helped me to distract myself from thinking of the reason why those pills were there. But no distraction could suppress my recognition, or her own, that time was getting short.

  She was in the hospital again in March, and a second time in May. The second time was longer than the first. When she was home, she sometimes had an appetite. I brought her a broiled chicken once, and smoked salmon and some other treats and good desserts, from a delicatessen on Third Avenue near 42nd Street, and we had a cheerful evening with each other like the ones we’d had before. But there were also times when she had no appetite at all except perhaps for something sweet—a slice of cheesecake, for example, or a piece of honeydew cut up into chunks—“icy cold, the only way that I can eat it now. …”

  One afternoon near the end of June we went outside, because it was pleasant weather and she said she’d been cooped up in the apartment for too long. We sat in a playground opposite her building and watched the children playing on the swings and slides. She didn’t ask about my mother this time. She lit up a cigarette and exhaled it slowly. Whatever damage it might do to smoke a few more cigarettes seemed unimportant to her now.

  – IV –

  The time came four weeks after that, when her doctor called from the hospital and urged me to get on a plane. He said that Alice was in very poor condition. He didn’t know how long she would survive. I flew to New York the following morning and got to the hospital a little after noon. When I walked into her room, oxygen was being fed to her through plastic tubes inserted in her nostrils. Electronic monitors next to her bed were measuring her vital signs. Her arms and cheeks were very thin. Her nightgown only partially concealed the portion of her chest where her breast had been removed.

  As sick as she was, she still was eating solid food. She said she’d eaten a little of her lunch but didn’t have dessert “because it had no flavor.” She told me that she had a taste for something like a piece of cake, something sweet, if I knew of any place around there where they sold it.

  There was an Italian neighborhood not far from the hospital. I went downstairs and out to the street and walked around to see if I could find a pastry shop. A few blocks from the hospital, I came upon an old Italian bakery. Two young women were working at the counter and were joking with the customers and with one another.

  When I asked them to pick out some pastries for me, since I didn’t know what any of these cakes and pastries were called, they joked with me a little too. Then they asked if this was for a patient at the hospital. I said, “Yes. It’s for someone who’s been very sick.” One of the sisters filled an extra box with
cookies decorated with round faces made of colored sugar and she said, “No charge for this,” and smacked her fingers to her lips like someone tossing off a kiss in an Italian movie, and then wrapped both boxes in red ribbons.

  When Alice opened the first box, then the second, and found cream-filled pastries in one of them and cookies in the other, she tried one of the cookies first and asked me where I got them. I told her about the bakery and the women who had waited on me and the one who gave me all the cookies.

  She said, “I bet you liked it when they joked with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it flattered you,” she said. “A man your age—tell the truth. I bet those girls were pretty.”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  She laughed, although she was in pain, and took my hand and gave it a slight squeeze. “If they looked as tasty as these cookies I don’t blame you in the least!”

  She tried one of the pastries and asked me if I knew what it was called. I said I hadn’t asked.

  “It’s got some rum in it, I think,” she said, eating a little more.

  “Is it good?”

  “Delicious.”

  Conversations about food, or friendly girls, or casual attractions, or all three, remained a pattern for us right up to the end. The last conversation that I had with her did not have to do with life or death, or love or hate, or God or faith, or any of the pain that she was going through. It was about hamburgers.

  I was with her in the hospital again that night, about two weeks before she died. She mentioned that McDonald’s was engaged in “war”—“a price war,” she explained—against its rival, Burger King. She said she thought that it was funny that a word like “war” would be employed in speaking of hamburgers. I thought it was funny too and made a foolish joke about two armies made up of hamburgers holding little swords and stabbing at each others’ rolls.