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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Throughout this time, her older sister, Lara, was in the New York City schools, where she’d been enticed into the same middle school, the same pretended “school for medical careers,” that Lisette, Vicky’s daughter, had attended also.

  I was relieved when a teacher at the school who was impressed by Lara’s eagerness to learn made contact with me on his own and told me he believed that he could find the time to give her extra help in order to make up for the historic failings of a school he was too honest to romanticize. Lara had escaped the run of short-term teachers and ensuing chaos that Pineapple’s class had undergone at P.S. 65. Her basic skills were well intact; so, with the tutorial assistance provided by her teacher, she managed to get out of middle school with creditable grades.

  In high school she again attracted the attention of an empathetic teacher who singled her out as a potential candidate for college. She later told me how important this had been, because the school, as she put it bluntly, was “not a very good one.” It was one of the newest generation of heavily promoted but unsuccessful “niche academies,” targeted at kids of color, that allegedly had found a way, in the unconvincing jargon that continues to be used today, “to break the mold” of failing schools and, again in the vocabulary more or less expected of administrators in the urban schools, “turn it all around.”

  If anyone had actually turned this school around, it had not been in a good direction. “We started,” Lara told me, “with sixty students in my ninth-grade class. Only twenty of them graduated,” she recalled—“and only ten of them deserved to.”

  Lara had been looking at college options in New York but, by the spring, she told me she’d decided to attend a college in Rhode Island so that she’d be near her younger sister. Pineapple had been on her own for two years by this time. Now, at last, the two would be together.

  Lara was awarded a financial package by the college, and the people at the church who had helped to meet Pineapple’s costs provided help to her as well. Still, she had to take on a substantial workload to earn enough to meet her personal expenses. Both Lara and Pineapple had to work during the summers too. Neither girl expected to be given a free ride. They also liked the sense of independence it afforded them to be earning money on their own.

  At the end of Lara’s freshman year in college and Pineapple’s junior year at boarding school, I got a startling and excited phone call from Pineapple.

  “Guess what?” she said. “My mother and father are moving to Rhode Island!” Her parents, she explained, after having been there several times to visit her, and now with Lara living there as well, had come to the decision to follow them out of New York and look for a home they could afford close to the town in which Pineapple went to school. “Jonathan! They’re really going to do it!” said Pineapple.

  Things moved quickly after that. In a letter Lara sent me only a month later, she told me they had found a house and that the people from the church had “helped my mother find a job.” Her father, she said, had found one on his own.

  Isabella’s job was in a local nursing home, caring for the elderly. Virgilio talked his way into a culinary job at one of the best hotels in Providence. His experience in cooking at a restaurant in Guatemala was not discounted this time, as had been the case when he was working in New York. The position he was given, as best I understood, was something on the order of a sous-chef in the hotel’s dining room.

  The modest home Pineapple’s parents found was in a waterside community where their backyard faced directly on a walkway, bordered by a biking path, and was just adjacent to a wooden footbridge that crossed a channel leading to the ocean. Mosquito was admitted to the school Pineapple was attending. When he was old enough, their little brother, Miguel, was admitted there as well.

  Happily, the distance between Rhode Island and New York was short enough for members of their family to come up and visit them on a routine basis. They’d usually come in Eliseo’s van, since he was the only family member who could afford a car. He shared it sometimes with Pineapple’s father, who had obtained a driver’s license shortly after coming to New York. As a result, the bond between the children and their New York relatives continued to be strong.

  Pineapple moved in with her family for her senior year. Academically, things never became easy for her, even at a school that did so much to bring her up to pace with other students in her class. But there was no question in her teachers’ minds that she would complete her studies in good order. And, while her grade-point average in the spring semester of that final year was not as high as she would have liked, she did get honors grades in two of her five subjects and passed the others with two C’s and one B-minus.

  Her graduation was a joyful day. A good-sized delegation from the family in New York drove up to the school to watch her walk across the stage and be handed her diploma. Afterwards, her parents had a party in their yard, as they did every time one of their children had achieved a victory they’d hoped for. According to her father, she was just the second person in their family (Lara was the first) to graduate from high school.

  Three months later, she would be in college.

  – III –

  Pineapple had gone on college tours with members of her class. But she had done this dutifully, in order not to be dismissive of all possibilities, because she had already settled on the college Lara had selected two years earlier. She had friends there among Lara’s classmates. More important, she would have her sister there when she felt the need for someone to confide in.

  Each of them, however, had made divergent choices when it came to fields of concentration. Lara had begun her first year as an education major, then switched to “English Lit and Writing” and, she said, “I’m glad I did because I’m reading so much stuff I really love that I never would have had the time to read if I’d stayed on in the program for certification.” Pineapple, on the other hand, decided upon social work and she never wavered from this plan throughout the years of college.

  Her first semesters were more challenging for her than I think she had expected. She failed two courses, one of them a science class, because she said she didn’t realize, when she chose it, that it was “way, way too advanced for me” and there was a basic course she should have taken first. “Bio-science … I didn’t transfer out in time.”

  Still, she was by no means drowning or demoralized. Her letters and phone calls were mostly optimistic, sparked with funny anecdotes and interesting insights into the dynamics of relationships among the different ethnic groups within the student body. In the spring, for instance, when she took a course in urban studies, she told me something that she said surprised her—“and, to tell the truth, it kind of annoys me”—about the way the other students, who were mostly white, tended to defer to her when it came to questions about race.

  “Every time something comes up in the class about the inner cities? You know? About the kids who live there? And the problems of their parents? And the schools they go to? And, you know, the bad stuff people think that everyone gets into? It seems like all the white kids in the class turn around and look at me before they give an answer. It’s like they want to check things out with me, to ask for my permission. I tell them, ‘Go ahead, girl! Speak your mind! If I think you’ve got it wrong, I’ll tell you.’ ”

  I was glad that her straightforward and ebullient style hadn’t been diminished too much by the struggles she’d been through while she’d been at prep school. I had the impression that her confidence to say what she believed had been eclipsed to a degree during those secondary years. Now, it seemed, her likable impertinence, although with more discretion and maturity, was flourishing once more.

  Still, I knew she had her insecurities. In a letter I received in the year that followed from a woman who emerged as one of the most consistently supportive friends and allies to Pineapple and her sisters, she wrote these words: “Brave fronts, soft souls.” She wa
s referring to the fortitude the girls displayed when, in Pineapple’s second year of college, her parents were confronted with a difficult dilemma that would force the girls to summon up a greater sense of self-reliance than had been required of them in the past. (I will return to that dilemma shortly.)

  But the “soft soul,” in Pineapple’s case at least—an ever-present recognition of her vulnerable status as a student, a quiet understanding of her family’s ultimate dependence on the loyalty, and continuity of loyalty, of those in Rhode Island who had been there from the start in the role of their defenders—this, along with an inherent tenderness of character, easily wounded sensibilities, emotions that were far more fragile than she would allow the world to see, were always there, as she would confide to me a little later on, just beneath the surface of audacity.

  CHAPTER 9

  Pineapple in All Her Glory (And Still Bossing Me Around)

  On September 5, 2009, I was in Washington National Airport waiting for a plane to Boston.

  Text message on my cell: “Happy birthday, Jonathan! Hope you weren’t too lonely, far away from home. Miss you a lot. College starts in ten more days. Talk soon. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”

  Two weeks later: an e-mail from Pineapple. “Hey Jonathan! Back at college. Here are the classes that I’m taking this semester. Anthropology (Non-western Worlds). We’re studying Nigeria and its different cultures. Also taking Intro to Psychology and in this class I’m learning of the workings of the mind and our behaviors. I’m also in a dance class, which I’d like to say is just because I need a daily workout. And I’m in a singing class to improve my voice. I also have an English class, plus tutorial in writing since you know that this has been my weakness.

  “I want to thank you and your assistant for sending me a laptop. I’m able now to type my papers on my own time and not have to count on the computers in the library, which closes way too early. …”

  September 30: “Hey Jonathan! I heard you’re coming to Rhode Island next month for a lecture. Can we do lunch while you’re here?”

  October 20: She and Lara met me in the lobby of a much-too-fancy old hotel where my hosts in Providence had put me up the night before. I found them sitting on a sofa near the registration desk, looking around them at the huge bouquets of flowers on the tables and an imposing chandelier that hung down from the ceiling.

  The hotel had a dining room, a little on the formal side, with dark wood panels and deep leather chairs; but it wasn’t crowded and the waitress led us to a semiprivate booth that looked out on a courtyard. I worried that the two of them, whose financial situation didn’t ordinarily allow them many luxuries, might feel ill at ease in this elaborate setting; but this was a needless worry. They seemed relaxed and comfortable and were looking through their menus before I opened mine.

  They ordered shrimp and scallops with linguine. When the waitress asked what they would like to drink, they asked for passion fruit and mango juice with lime, which sounded awfully sweet to me but which Lara recommended, so I ordered it as well.

  They asked me if I liked it.

  “Very good. Something new to me,” I said.

  “It’s good for you to try new things,” Pineapple said.

  At one moment during lunch she noticed that there was an ink stain on my shirt where I’d put a black pen in my pocket, but without the top attached. She leaned across the table so that she could take the fabric in her hands. “It’s going to be hard to get that out. You need to be more careful.”

  After we’d eaten, we stayed there for an hour. It turned out they had waited until now to bring up something serious that was weighing on their minds. Pineapple told me that the immigration service, for reasons neither of them knew, had denied their father’s application for renewal of his green card. If this ruling could not be reversed, it would terminate his status as a legal immigrant. A lawyer in Providence was helping him to file an appeal.

  In the interim, he could not continue working in the restaurant of the hotel, which could no longer legally employ him. Compounding the difficulties that the family now would face, their mother had been laid off from the job she had enjoyed, working with the elderly, and had since been working as a housekeeper at one of the chain motels.

  “She’s struggling,” Lara said. “She’s on her knees, scrubbing floors, working full-time-plus.” This was all the harder, she explained, because her mother, although she was only forty-two, had premature arthritis. “She can barely make a fist, but the hotel has this rule. You’re not allowed to use a mop to clean the floors. You have to get down on your knees and scrub the bathroom tiles with a cloth.” Her mother, she said, was also getting stomach pains and headaches, which may have been occasioned by her nervousness about their father’s situation.

  Both girls told me they were praying for their mother and their father. Both said they believed in God, but, as they explained this, in rather different ways. Lara said that she considered herself Catholic, but she added that she had no close attachment to “any special church” and went to “different churches” with her friends from college. She hadn’t found one yet “that fits with my beliefs, where I feel that I belong.”

  Pineapple did not go to church at all. She told me that she prayed but did not believe in God “as somebody like Jesus—I mean, like a person”—but as “something like a power,” “something good,” “something that protects you and looks over you.” She said that when she spoke of God, however, “I keep on saying ‘him’ or ‘he’—you know? As if it was my father or grandfather.”

  They had to leave at 3:00 p.m. because Pineapple had a seminar at four. Lara decided they should take a taxi in order to be sure Pineapple wasn’t late for class. The doorman stepped out on the street and whistled at the line of cabs. Before I could think of it, Lara handed him a tip. “Thank you for lunch,” Pineapple said. Poised and polite, they got into the taxi and headed back to school.

  Virgilio’s attorney, as I had expected, had no success with his appeal. Pineapple told me, just before Thanksgiving, that he would be leaving in another week to return to Guatemala. Their mother would remain behind to provide a home for Miguel and Mosquito. She and Lara, living in their college dorms, would carry on as they had done before. Their tuition, room and board, and related college costs would continue to be met by their financial packages and the help they were receiving from the people at the church. And they still were earning money from the jobs they did under their work-study grants, some of which they said that they would try to use to help their mother.

  If their mother should decide at a later time to follow her husband back to Guatemala, Lara and Pineapple said they had found out they could be their brother’s legal guardians, if their parents would agree, so that he could keep on at his school here in Rhode Island. Lara was in her senior year and would graduate in the spring. She wanted to go on and obtain a graduate degree in order to be certified as a classroom teacher. “But if it’s just impossible,” she said, “I would put it off a year, or maybe two years, so that I could work full-time” and earn enough to function as a back-up for the other members of the family.

  After Virgilio left for Guatemala, Pineapple told me that he phoned them or their mother almost every night. Even at a distance, his affectionate protectiveness continued to be comforting, a steady source of consolation for the miles and the border that divided them. Some of the people in Rhode Island, nonetheless, were very harsh in speaking of Virgilio, according to Pineapple. They had not believed him when he said his green card had been non-renewed, or else condemned him retroactively for not taking measures to prevent its cancellation, which they regarded as an indication that he was neglectful in caring for his family.

  Pineapple and Lara defended him with fierceness. Lara made the observation that many otherwise enlightened people in the white community tended to be sympathetic to the mothers of black and Hispanic children, but looked upon the father
s, almost automatically, through a lens of stereotype, as lacking in responsibility. These assumptions, Lara said, according to a book she’d read the year before, “have deep roots in history.”

  February 21, 2010: Mosquito, who was in her final year of high school and would graduate in May in almost the same week as Lara’s college graduation, sent me an e-mail about the college that she planned to go to. She had been awarded a financial package of $40,000 by a private college in Connecticut of which I knew very little other than the fact that it was widely known for its athletic programs but, as a friend informed me, was not thought to be especially distinguished in its academic offerings.

  I wrote to her, “I know I have no right butting in,” but I said that, with her nearly perfect academic record, I thought she ought to think this through a little more before she came to a decision.

  She replied the next day, “You have every right to butt in, but this is the school I want to go to. They have a department of criminal justice, which is very good and is what I plan to major in. Also, if you’re doing studies in the honors program, you get to work with teachers in tutorial relationships, which is something that I like because it’s not impersonal. I feel the school fits perfectly with my ambitions and I’ve been there and love everything about it.”

  Good, I thought! She knows exactly what she wants. She told me that she wasn’t angry with me for intruding. “I know,” she said, “you only wanted what you thought was best for me. …”

  Pineapple wrote to me at the start of April: “Heyyyy Jonathan!! I did not forget you. I’m a little stressed because I’m taking harder classes this semester. Sociology 208. Math 139. Allied Studies, which is s’posed to help me to stay organized. English 100. History of Greece and Rome and the rest of Europe up to something like the Middle Ages. … Doing well, but hoping to do better.”