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

by Jonathan Kozol

  “I didn’t know until the next day that my lower back was hurt and I’d messed up my sciatic nerve. I only knew I had a sharp pain just above my hip. My supervisor said to go and see a doctor but not to tell him this had happened while I was at work.

  “So, you know me and my big mouth. I went to the hospital and, of course, I told them everything.”

  Antsy tried to keep on working after that. “I started reading all my patients’ histories. No one ever showed this stuff to me before. Staff members weren’t expected to examine the case histories. I told my supervisor: ‘There needs to be more information and more education given to the staff.’ He said he’d hold a meeting to discuss this. But his main concern was that I would tell somebody what was going on.

  “Some of the people on the staff were good. One of them told me other patients had been beaten too. So I told this to my supervisor, and he asked me, ‘Have you talked to anyone about this?’ I said, ‘Yes. I told my doctor and my priest.’ I told him, ‘You can’t treat retarded people like you do.’ ”

  They never got to fire her. She had to quit because she was in too much pain. For a long while after that, she said she found it hard to sleep, or clean the house, or climb into the bath, or go out to the store or to St. Ann’s. But the physical pain was “not as bad as the frustration that I felt at being cooped up here in the apartment all that time.” She fell, she said, “into the most horrible depression.” Even when the medicine her doctor gave her managed somewhat to reduce the pain, “it was a struggle to get up each morning and go out the door.”

  A surgical procedure and intensive rehabilitative treatment ultimately relieved the pain. Antidepressants got her out the door. “Once I started going out,” she said, “my spirits were restored and I didn’t need the medications anymore.”

  People I know who undergo depression cope with their feelings in a multitude of ways, some of which—in Vicky’s case, for instance—worsen their depression and isolate them from their friends. In Antsy’s case, except for the time when her spinal injury forced her to stay home, she had always compensated for the inward pull—the withdrawal from activity that’s familiar to depression—by throwing herself outward into the thick and thin of life, into the streets, into the schools, into the battle for clean air, into the battle to clean out a drug-infested block so she could have a party for her baseball team.

  To battle darkness, she was always lighting fires of excitement for herself and Leonardo, encouraging his playfulness, spurring him on to indulge his curiosities, filling her apartment with more kids than it could hold and, even at the time when she was in the deepest pain, bringing food to UPS so that he could get a respite from the college cafeteria.

  The last time I saw her, in the summer of this year, a bunch of Leonardo’s college friends were coming there for dinner. Antsy said, “I’m feeling a lot better now. Back doesn’t hurt unless I bend way over. Then a twinge, right down here”—she reached her hand around her waist—“and my old friend, Mr. Pain, says, ‘Here I am again!’ ” She kept a heating pad on her sofa, but she didn’t sit on it for long. She kept getting up and going to the door or looking out the window to see if Leonardo and his friends were there.

  I had to leave before they came but, two weeks later, I was at St. Ann’s again. Leonardo told me, when I called him in advance, that he’d love to talk some more if I wanted to stop by.

  Antsy was out when I arrived. He’d been in the living room working on a script he was preparing for his stand-up act. He showed me the first lines, which he said were “very rough.” As a joke or as a form of flattery, he asked if he could have my pen, and so we traded pens with one another.

  He hadn’t yet had much success in finding clubs that would let him do his act on more than rare occasions. But he told me he’d been branching out and looking beyond comedy to see if he could find an acting job and had started showing up at casting calls and asking about agents. His earlier antipathy to “speaking other people’s lines” had been, he said, “an ego thing. … I like to perform. Any way I can.” If he could find an acting role, “whether it’s a comic role or something very serious,” he thought that he could do it and was hoping he would have a chance.

  In the midst of these ambitious plans and amidst the friendships he’d developed in the stand-up clubs and at the outer fringes of the theater world, he told me he had kept in contact with some of the friends with whom he grew up in the Bronx. One of the boys he’d always liked, who used to hang around St. Ann’s when he was in kindergarten and the first and second grades—an angelic-looking child who was not, in fact, angelic in the least and, despite the pastor’s affectionate attention and efforts at protection, had started drifting off into the streets when he was only eight or nine—had ended up in trouble with the law before he was sixteen. He was in and out of jail for a number of short stays while Leonardo was in college.

  “When he was not at Rikers Island,” Leonardo said, “he liked to stay in our apartment, because he never really had a home to call his own.” His mother lived on St. Ann’s Avenue when I knew him as a child. I didn’t know what problems she was facing, but her life, and that of her son, had always been in some kind of disorder. He seldom had clean clothes to wear to school or sat down to a decent meal unless Antsy or another neighbor fed him. “Even today,” Leonardo said, “he feels more at home with us than in his own apartment.”

  Sometimes, he continued, “when I was home from college for a weekend, I’d bring him back with me to school on Sunday night. He had no purpose in his life. He wasn’t doing anything. It’s hard to do something to help yourself when no one else around you in the street is doing anything. …

  “When he came to college once, I kept him with me for two weeks. He had to wake up with me every day. He had to come to every class. I told my teachers in advance. In a class on sociology, he asked the teacher questions. The students seemed to like him and they asked him questions too. He would get right into it. He said he didn’t want to leave. ‘I love it here,’ he told me.

  “He saw people of his age going to their classes with their backpacks. He was amazed, after class, to see them, with their books and laptops, lying on the grass. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘You got trees! You got grass!’ It wasn’t like he’d never seen a tree before—it was the whole setting. Students playing Frisbee. Other students studying. Open spaces. Lots of grass! There was a pond. People looked relaxed.

  “He saw people going somewhere with their lives. And he liked what he was seeing. I think that something changed in him. He didn’t get in trouble for a long time after that. …

  “He’s still at our house a lot. When my college friends are here, he sometimes seems to think that maybe he’s supposed to slip away. I tell him, ‘No. You’re my friend. We’ve known each other all our lives. When I go to do things with the other guys, you’re going to come with us.’ ”

  He got up to get us cold drinks from the kitchen. I took that as an opening to shift the ground a bit, because I had a question in my mind that I assumed he must have thought about as well. It was difficult, as he’d said, to break into the world of stand-up entertainment, and he was discovering it was even harder to get into acting. “If, at a certain point, it proves to be impossible. …” He nodded at those words before I could finish, and he told me that he’d talked about this with his mother.

  He said that if he found he simply couldn’t “hack it” in the world of entertainment, he had more or less made up his mind to go back to college for a graduate degree “in something like developmental studies” in order to obtain the depth of understanding and, he hoped, the level of authority that would make it possible for him to find a role in “helping to shape policies, maybe in the government, maybe in some other way, that affect the lives of children.” He was, he said, already so involved with young men like the friend he had described that it would be a natural progression “to notch it up enoug
h” to get himself to a point where he could exercise at least a small degree of power in altering conditions that had led so many kids he knew into “lives that have no value to them, and no meaning.”

  Previously, he said, in spite of all the confidence he’d been able to display ever since his years in boarding school and college, he suspected there had been “some kind of obstacle, some kind of ‘wall’ ” within his mind—“not economic, something else”—between himself and any higher academic goals or aspirations. “Whatever it was, that wall is gone. I know that I can do this if I want.”

  At those words, I asked him if he ever felt the hankering he’d had some years before in reference to psychiatry.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.”

  It had often come into my mind, after he had told me of his internship in college, that with his warm, supportive personality and his relaxing manner, not to speak of his compassion and his easygoing sense of the comedic, he could probably walk into the darkest ward of any mental institution and bring a smile to the most despondent patient in the room. I also thought he had the keen eye and quick intuitive intelligence of a fine clinician. But I didn’t say this. I thought that it would push the envelope too far, and so I dropped the matter there.

  Leonardo will be reading what I’m writing here. He’s mature and wise enough to tell me to “shove off”—although I’m sure he’d say it in much nicer words—if he thinks I’ve overstepped the boundaries of a friendship between two adults who, in most respects, now stand on equal ground. He’s no longer the little boy who introduced me to the streets of the South Bronx and consumed a giant bag of cookies by the time that we got back. Like many people who are fond of someone whom they’ve known since he was a boy, I see him sometimes through a double lens. Endearing child. Strong and decent man. He’ll make his own decisions and his own plans for the future, and he’ll do it at the time that’s right for him. With Leonardo, as with others who were children when we met, but are not children now, I have to stop myself from time to time in order to remember this.

  CHAPTER 8

  Pineapple Comes of Age (Part One)

  She was in kindergarten on the day we met when I walked into her classroom at P.S. 65. She was six, a bossy little person, slightly on the plumpish side, with carefully braided and brightly beaded cornrows hanging down across her eyes. She wrote her letters in reverse. Her teacher suggested I might try to help her figure out the way to get those symbols facing in the right direction.

  But when I leaned across her shoulder to watch her shape her letters, she twisted around and looked at me with stern dissatisfaction. “You’re standing on the wrong side,” she instructed me and indicated that I ought to stand behind her other shoulder. Once I was standing over her left shoulder, she seemed to be entirely pleased, as if things now were as they ought to be.

  We got to know each other very quickly because, at the end of school each day, she came to the afterschool at St. Ann’s. So I’d see her sometimes in her class at P.S. 65 and then in the afternoon I would see her wave to me as she and her schoolmates raced into the basement of the church to have their snack before they went upstairs for their tutorial.

  Her authoritative inclinations became increasingly robust with every passing year. By the time she was in third grade, she began expressing her displeasure at the nature of my social life—she knew I wasn’t married and she tried to fix me up with Miss Gallombardo, a very pretty third-grade teacher at her school. Within another year, she began to comment on the suit that I’d been wearing ever since I met her. It was a black suit, a little on the formal side, from a store in Harvard Square, but she noticed it was kind of shabby and she made it obvious that this did not please her.

  “Jonathan,” she asked me once, “is that your only suit?”

  “No,” I said. “I have another suit.” But I told her that the other one was virtually the same.

  She reached out to finger the lapel the way my mother might have done when I was much younger. We were sitting opposite each other on two metal chairs, so that she was close enough to see the white threads showing through the fabric near the button-holes and at the bottom edges of the sleeves.

  “Jonathan,” she said, folding her arms against her chest, as people do when they’re sizing up a situation, “I’d like you to look more respectable.”

  Then, without the slightest hint of hesitation or any fear of impropriety in talking to a grown-up in this way: “Do me a favor. Someday, when you’re over there, in Manhattan”—“over there” was a term she used to indicate a nicer part of town—“go into a good store and buy yourself a nice new suit. Will you promise me you’ll do that?”

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  A month later, I went to a clothing store in Boston and bought myself a suit I thought was quite respectable. The only problem, from Pineapple’s point of view, was that the new suit was a black one, like the ones that I already had.

  She sat me down for another conversation.

  “Jonathan,” she said, “I know that you get sad sometimes. I can tell when you come in.” She put her hands on top of one of mine. “But you don’t always need to dress in black. …”

  Pineapple was in love with life. In spite of the ugliness of the building where she lived and the one in which she went to school, she had a buoyant and affirming personality. Even her most serious complaints were usually conveyed within a set of terms that were peevishly amusing rather than self-pitiful.

  The problems at her school, however, were severe. P.S. 65, the same school Ariella’s older boys had attended several years before, was almost always in a state of chaos because so many teachers did not stay for long. They’d often disappear in less than half a year, and there was a damaging reliance upon inexperienced and unprepared instructors. In Pineapple’s second-grade year, twenty-eight of the fifty members of the faculty had never taught before, and half of them left the school by the next September. In her third- and fourth-grade years she had seven different teachers.

  She wrote a little essay once describing those who came and went. One, she said, wasn’t a real teacher, “only a helper-teacher”—presumably because she wasn’t certified to teach but had nonetheless been thrown into Pineapple’s class with nobody to guide her. Another was “a man who liked us,” whose name, she said, was “Mr. Camel,” but “he said he needed to earn money, so he found a better job. …” A third one, she said, “had a mental problem” and used offensive language in chastising the children. “Sit your A-S-S-E-S down,” Pineapple quoted her, spelling out the word because she couldn’t bring herself to say it. “And she had yellow teeth that looked like fangs. And so they fired her.”

  Instructional discontinuity was not the only major problem at the school. The overcrowding of the building and its archaic infrastructure did their damage to the children too. When I went to lunch one day with Pineapple’s class, the students left their room at twelve-fifteen. But, because the lunchroom was already packed, they had to sit down in a hallway on the floor and wait for thirty minutes before they could file down a dark and narrow stairwell, with metal grating on the side, while another class was coming up the opposite direction. A mob scene developed at the bottom of the stairs. A school official started shouting at the children. Pineapple stuffed her fingers in her ears.

  Once they were admitted to the basement cafeteria, they had to sit and wait another twenty minutes before the crowd thinned out enough for them to get something to eat. They were finished eating by around one-thirty, at which point a woman with a megaphone told them to get up and put away their trays. Then they had to go back to their tables and remain there, for no reason that I could discern, until they were at last released to go outside and run around the schoolyard—no grass, cracked cement—before they were herded back into the same filing process as before. At this point, a fire bell rang, so they stayed there frozen in their lines for fifteen min
utes more. They were finally permitted to return to class at 2:00 p.m., nearly two hours since they’d filed out.

  In the hour remaining before the end of school, I visited another class, then waited outside at dismissal time so I could walk Pineapple to St. Ann’s. When she came out she asked if I would stop with her at an umbrella-covered stand on a corner opposite the school so we could enjoy one of her favorite treats (also mine), which the children called an “icie,” coconut-flavored, creamy, and delicious, and then, in spite of all her discontents with school, she chattered gaily all the way down to the church.

  The apartment building where Pineapple lived—part of the dangerous Diego-Beekman complex—was even less attractive than her school. When I visited her home she’d wait out front and lead me up the stairs. The elevator, which she almost never used, was pocked with bullet indentations because of the gang activity that took place in that building and the ones nearby. One night, when Pineapple was eight, helicopters swooped down, spotlights glaring in the windows of apartments. Seven men were led away in handcuffs from Pineapple’s building, charged with selling crack cocaine and heroin.

  Pineapple had two sisters. (A brother would be born a few years later.) The oldest was a serious girl named Lara who had a steady sense of sober judgment that Pineapple counted on for guidance. Her younger sister, whom I called Mosquito because she was tiny and seemed forever to be darting here and there in almost constant motion, was eight years old when Pineapple was ten.

  As skittery and squirmy as she was when I got to know her, Mosquito soon developed into a quick-witted and perceptive little girl, with incisive verbal skills that often took her teachers by surprise. When she was in third grade, her teacher asked the class to write an essay on Cortez, Magellan, or de Soto. She narrowed it to Cortez and de Soto, then selected Cortez because, she told her teacher, “De Soto stole the Indians’ gold, but Cortez stole my people’s soul.” I wasn’t sure how she’d arrived at this distinction, but I was surprised she knew this much about de Soto or Cortez, because there was almost nothing of this nature in the books about “the great conquistadors” that children of her age were given at their school.