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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Pineapple’s mother and father were from Guatemala. She and Lara liked to tell me stories about the people in their family who remained there. They also had many members of their family living near them in New York. I knew some of their cousins from the afterschool at St. Ann’s Church and I’d met their mother, who was named Isabella, when I’d walked Pineapple home. But I didn’t get to know their father and his brothers and their other relatives until an evening in December of Pineapple’s fifth-grade year.

  It was, to be precise, on December 31, 1999, when her father gave a party, as he did every year, mostly for their relatives, to celebrate the new year. Pineapple knew that I’d be in New York and apparently had told this to her father, who, she said, had told her I’d be “very welcome” at the party. It took arm-twisting on Pineapple’s part to get me to say yes, because I don’t go out to many parties (and Pineapple knew I didn’t socialize a lot), but after she had asked me several times I agreed to come.

  I had another obligation earlier that evening, so I didn’t get there until late. It was close to midnight by the time Pineapple, who’d been watching for me from her window, came downstairs to let me in and lead me up to the apartment, which was packed from wall to wall with grown-ups and at least a dozen children, all of whom, she told me, were her cousins. Guatemalan music, which I’d never heard before, was playing in the living room. Guatemalan food was set out on a table. Her father, who was named Virgilio, greeted me enthusiastically, wished me a happy new year, and brought me to the kitchen, where he scooped up from a big glass bowl a rather potent Guatemalan drink made of mango juice and rum, after which he led me back into the other room to introduce me to his brothers and to Isabella’s sister.

  He told me he was teaching himself English and now and then would ask me if a word he used for something was the right one and would urge me to correct him when he got it wrong. He was a warm, expansive man, tall and slender, with his hair in dreadlocks. While I was standing with him and his older brother, he spoke to both of us in English as a matter of politeness. He’d reach out for my arm from time to time in order to be sure I felt included in the conversation.

  Lara and Mosquito and their older cousin Madeline, whom I’d tutored when she was a nine-year-old, were in a bedroom with their mother in front of a TV set, waiting for the lighted ball to drop upon the stroke of midnight in Times Square. Their mother got up to welcome me. The rest of them were glued to the screen and, except for Lara, who gave me a little wave, paid me no attention until the ball had fallen and they all broke into cheers.

  When we went back to the living room, the music had been turned up. Most of the children started dancing, girls with girls (the boys were bashful) or else with their parents. Pineapple asked if I could dance. I told her, “No!”—because I knew I was an awful dancer. But she and Madeline insisted that I try. So they took me by the hand and dragged me out into the middle of the room.

  They made me dance with each of them in turn, and with their aunt, and finally with Lara. When the music ended temporarily, Pineapple told me, “You did good! You see? It isn’t hard to learn. …” But my shirt by now had soaked through to the skin, so Virgilio gave me one of his long linen shirts, open-necked and comfortable, and insisted that I have another drink, which he said would help to cool me off.

  Virgilio’s older brother, whose name was Eliseo, was sitting in the kitchen with Pineapple’s mother. Isabella noticed that I hadn’t eaten yet, so she made a plate of food for me and, while I ate, Eliseo talked with me about his son, who was a teenager now but whom I remembered as a cheerful ten-year-old who’d been friendly to me when I first came to St. Ann’s. He had started getting into trouble while he was in middle school and, by the time he went to high school, he’d begun to get involved with older boys who, his father feared, were using drugs or selling them. So Eliseo recently had sent him back to Guatemala, where he knew he would be physically secure and would be cared for by his relatives.

  At the end of the evening, I had a quiet conversation with Pineapple’s mother. She spoke to me, with Pineapple translating or paraphrasing for her—she did not know English yet—about her job as an afternoon and night attendant, taking care of children who had HIV. She also told me of her husband’s job at a Manhattan restaurant—washing dishes in the basement, even though, according to Pineapple, he had been a chef and had run a restaurant in his town in Guatemala. Since her mother worked so late, Pineapple said, it was her father who often got them up and made their breakfast and sent them off to school with their books and backpacks, and made sure they had their homework papers.

  Pineapple’s parents recognized the serious deficiencies of P.S. 65. But their visits to the school and the questions they would ask were, her mother told me, repeatedly rebuffed by those in the office to whom they’d be referred when they sought a meeting with the principal. And because, English fluency apart, they were not familiar with the jargon and the acronymic phrases that were often thrown at parents by officials at the school, they came away most often with the sense that nothing that had worried them was likely to be changed.

  This, at least, was the impression I received in those final moments in the kitchen with Pineapple’s mother. But more important, when I thought back on that evening in Pineapple’s home, was the recognition I had gained of the energy and joyfulness and collective reinforcement of her sense of affirmation that she was receiving from her parents and their relatives. Amidst the grimness of the building and the neighborhood around them, her mother and father had created in their home an island of emotional security and warm congeniality that any child, rich or poor, would probably have envied. I hoped that this would prove to be a bedrock of stability from which she’d be able to pursue the opportunities that were now about to open up before her.

  – II –

  Pineapple’s years at P.S. 65 were nearly at an end. During the spring, the pastor of St. Ann’s began to probe the possibilities of winning her admission to a private day school in New York to avoid the middle schools that had proven so destructive to the adolescents in that neighborhood.

  Martha talked with me at length before she did this. She was somewhat torn in making the decision. Both of us were strong supporters of the public schools—not of demoralizing places such as P.S. 65 and the local middle schools but, on a larger level, of the whole idea of public education as something that was elemental to American democracy. Still, when a child, as in Pineapple’s case, had been shortchanged so badly in her first six years of school, Martha was not willing (nor was I) to let her be denied the opportunities that lay beyond the options the city had prescribed.

  In reaching out to build support for programs at St. Ann’s, Martha had developed close affiliations with a number of the affluent and more progressive churches in New York, some of which ran private schools, attended for the most part by children of the privileged. One of these schools, which was situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and which had some dedication to the value of diversity in class and racial terms, was willing to admit Pineapple and provide her with a scholarship, even with the recognition that it would be hard for her to catch up with her peers.

  “It will be a struggle,” the principal advised me when, at Martha’s urging, I got in contact with the school before Pineapple and her parents came to a decision. “But we like this little girl and we’d like to make this work if the child is willing.” I shared this with Pineapple and her mom and dad and, because of what they knew by now about the local middle schools, they told me they were eager to move forward. Martha, as I recall, helped them to fill out the application.

  Pineapple’s acceptance at the school was conditioned on her willingness to repeat a grade because she was far below the academic level of the sixth-grade students at the school—and, as it turned out, below most of the fifth-grade students also. The run of transient teachers at P.S. 65 had done its greatest damage to her literacy skills, a degree of
damage that she could not easily reverse even in a school that had the means to offer her the individual attention that had been impossible at P.S. 65.

  In this respect, Pineapple’s situation was entirely different from the one that Leonardo had confronted when he went to boarding school. For Leonardo, as we’ve seen, the transition had been easy. For Pineapple, everything from this point on would be an uphill climb.

  As early as the winter of her first year at the school, her principal and teachers, in the letters and reports that they were sending on to me, noted that the difficulties Pineapple was facing went beyond her deficient writing skills and reading comprehension. They also recognized that she had never learned the whole array of study-skills that students who had had the benefit of reputable elementary education had mastered long before.

  Many students at the school had been there since their kindergarten year, and quite a few, when they entered, had already had as many as three years of preschool education in one or another of those rich developmental programs that were known to upper-class New Yorkers as “the baby ivies.” So, in this respect as well, Pineapple found herself competing on a playing field in which the odds were rigged against a child of her background from the very start.

  Her science teacher noted that, while he had given her an honors grade for class participation and for laboratory work, her final grade for fall semester was an Incomplete because she didn’t take a make-up for a test that she had failed and then missed a more decisive test during the marking period. He added, however, that her oral presentations frequently were very good and he said he was convinced that, in the second term, she would progress more rapidly. In math and English, her grades at the first marking period were also in the failing range, but here again her teachers said that they were hopeful she would pass both courses by the end of spring semester.

  Her social studies teacher, on the other hand, was more censorious and less optimistic. On the basis of a stern report she wrote about Pineapple in December, she struck me as a person of unusual rigidity who seemed to be unwilling to make any alterations or revisions in some hopelessly archaic lesson plans in order to adapt to the social differences among the children in her class. Pineapple, she said in one of her more annoying observations, “was perfectly capable of writing journal entries from the perspective of a Medieval noblewoman,” which was the topic she had been assigned. “She made one or two attempts, then gave it up entirely.” It came into my mind that Pineapple might have shown more zest for this assignment if she’d been allowed to write, not from the perspective of the noblewoman, but from that of somebody who had to wait upon the noblewoman—which I thought, given the subservient positions that her mother and so many other women in the South Bronx had to fill, might have had more meaning for her and perhaps elicited some of that spiky sense of “where it’s at” that might make her entries in a journal actually quite interesting.

  The principal noted, nonetheless, that “socially, she is much beloved, especially by younger students. I love her. And most of her teachers do.” As spring arrived, she suggested that tutorials during the summer months with a member of the faculty might be a good idea and asked if I could help to underwrite this.

  The teacher who took on this job told me at the start of August that Pineapple had been working hard and had made up most of a year’s work in science by that time and was getting better at note-taking in her other subjects. (“Note-taking is hard for her, because her spelling is so poor. It also seems that she was given almost no instruction about punctuation in her elementary years. We’ve made up for some of this. …”)

  August 9: “Last week was a good one. We worked on syntax. Also run-on sentences. She’s learning how to break them up and punctuate effectively. One problem: She sometimes doesn’t bother to complete a sentence and answers an assignment only in word fragments. She’s also frequently misreading words of similar configuration (‘confidence’ for ‘conference,’ for example). We need to do more work on that in our next few sessions. …”

  August 30: “I think she’s made good progress. She’s been cooperative and has frequently surprised herself when she’s come upon a complicated word she says she’s never seen before but has decoded it successfully. All in all, I’m feeling very positive.”

  Her progress remained gradual that year and the next. “It’s still tough,” she told me in the winter of her third year at the school, “but my teachers say I’m doing better.” And, although she had to struggle even harder in the year that followed—at times, the gains that she was making would come nearly to a standstill as the subject matter in her eighth-grade classes became increasingly complex—she continued moving, almost imperceptibly, closer to grade level.

  She had only one complaint about the students at the school. Some of the wealthier girls, she said “stick together all the time. You know, like they’re better than the rest of us?” But, she added, there were others “who try to be nice to me.” In the spring of that year, one of her classmates asked her to a weekend birthday party at her family’s country house. Pineapple was astounded when she and two other girls were picked up in Manhattan in a helicopter.

  “Wow!” she said. “I’ve never seen a house as big as that before.” But she said that she enjoyed the party, and all the girls were given presents by her schoolmate’s parents.

  The school, regrettably, had no upper level. It ended in eighth grade. At that point, the pastor once again began exploring private schools with which she was familiar in order that Pineapple would not lose the gains she’d made and would get the further preparation she would need if she were to realize what was now her stated goal of going on to college—the same goal that her classmates for the past four years regarded as a normal expectation.

  Here, once again, Martha’s well-developed gift for reaching out to institutions that professed to have a deep commitment to inclusiveness turned out to be essential. An excellent school, not in New York but, as it happened, in Rhode Island, where a group of charitable people had come to know Pineapple in the course of volunteer work they’d been doing at St. Ann’s, accepted her enthusiastically and provided nearly a full scholarship to pay for her tuition. An Episcopal church, affiliated with the school, raised extra funds to cover costs that weren’t included in the scholarship.

  Pineapple knew she’d miss her parents and her sisters—and her little brother, who was three years old by now—but she became excited about going to the school after she had visited and met some of its teachers and seen its lovely campus, which was in a town not far from Providence. Although the school was rigorous in academic terms, it was less internally competitive than what she had been used to in New York. The demographics of the school were also more diverse—“majority white,” Pineapple told me, “many Asian, many black, some Hispanic, and some who are ‘combinations.’ ”

  She entered the school in 2004 and felt at home there from the start. The white girls in her class, some of whom were wealthy but not at the stratospheric level of so many of her classmates in New York, did not, she told me, “go around in cliques together. It’s a different kind of school. Everybody here is nice to one another. It’s like—you know?—we all accept each other.”

  She did confess she missed her family, as she had expected. “I’ve never been away from home before,” she told me in the winter. “So I’ve had to learn how to adapt to that.” But she said with pride that, even though her grades were “you know? not so good?” she didn’t flunk any of her courses in the first semester; and she did much better in the one that followed.

  One of the special virtues of this school was its quick responsiveness to difficulties students might encounter at the start of a new course or at the introduction of new subject matter in a given course. When she ran into problems, teachers did not wait until she had received a crushing set of grades but intervened before she had to undergo that blow to her self-confidence. “They’d say,
‘I’ll help you. You come in.’ And I’d go in. And right away, they’d sit you down and show you something you were doing wrong. And it was like they knew how to ‘unblock’ you. And they’d kind of hold your hand until they knew you got the point. And then I’d move right on. …”

  By her second year, her reading comprehension had “skyrocketed”—that was her English teacher’s term—but, with the volume of material her classes were assigned to read, keeping up with those assignments, said the teacher, wasn’t easy for her. By this time, however, she’d developed strong attachments to her teachers. She listed several that she said she “liked really a lot.” All but one were women. One of them, she said, “is very young and she lives on campus and she helps me to correct my papers, but she doesn’t keep reminding me when I have something due. She makes me remind myself. If I don’t, she says she isn’t going to pass me.

  “When I talk with her at night? It’s not about my work. It’s completely different. She’s not strict with me at all. She’s like a big sister.”

  In academic terms, that second year became the breakthrough year. Still struggling to perfect her writing skills and needing to read more each night than she’d ever had to read before, still missing deadlines on her class assignments more often than she should, she nonetheless appeared to have emerged from any last remaining doubts as to whether she would meet the school’s prerequisites for graduation. “It was that year,” she told me, looking back upon this later, “that I knew for sure that I could do it and that I’d be going on to college.”