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

by Jonathan Kozol

  She told me Lara’s graduation was coming up in May—“May 22,” she said.

  A month later she reminded me again about the graduation. “We’re going to have a barbecue in the afternoon. Starts at two. I hope that you can come. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”

  I had to be in Boston the morning of the graduation, so I drove directly to their home and ended up arriving early for the party in the afternoon. There were only about a dozen people who’d arrived before me, relatives who’d driven up with Pineapple’s uncle from New York the night before, and a few of Lara’s closest friends who were in the kitchen with her mother.

  The big surprise for me (Pineapple purposely had not told me to expect this) was that Virgilio was there. He was in the backyard setting up the barbecue when I came up the driveway. He gave me a hug and a terrific smile, like someone who had just performed a magic trick, outwitting all the forces of the immigration service that had kept him from his children. He took off the long white apron he was wearing and we sat together at a table in a corner of the garden so he could explain to me how he had been able to get across the border, and across the country, without any papers.

  He had come across the border from Mexico to Arizona, not far from Nogales—not at the legal crossing point but at another spot where people crossed at night illegally. From there, he took a bus to San Diego, where he used his U.S. driver’s license to get on a plane for New York City, and then drove here to Rhode Island in a rental car so that he’d arrive before his relatives. In spite of all the condemnation he’d incurred from his critics in Rhode Island who persisted in believing that he’d left his family of his own volition, with the implication that he was deficient in his love for his own children, he had been prepared to undergo arrest—or, given the vigilante atmosphere along the Arizona border, even greater dangers—in order to attend his daughter’s graduation.

  He said that he intended to remain until he could learn more about the reasons for Isabella’s headaches and her worsening arthritis, and then figure out the implications for the children if Isabella did decide, which he said was still uncertain, to return with him to Guatemala. He was less concerned about the girls, who, he knew, were capable of handling themselves in their parents’ absence since they’d have each other to rely upon, than he was about their brother.

  He didn’t want to interrupt the schooling Miguel was receiving but he also said that he did not believe a child who was only ten was old enough to live without his mother. In regard to Lara’s and Pineapple’s wish to keep him here and function as his guardians, Virgilio, speaking in his measured English syllables, questioned whether they were truly able to assume so much responsibility. As mature as they appeared—and, in the case of Lara, as judicious in her thinking as he considered her to be—he said he wasn’t confident that they could fill a parent’s role or whether it was fair for him to let them even try to take on that position.

  The more he spoke, the more I sensed how carefully and searchingly he’d been thinking through a set of questions he could not resolve but which saddened him tremendously. He reached out and put his hand around my arm and pressed it hard—his hand was strong—and when he spoke about Miguel, I could see his eyes were glistening slightly. It seemed as if he hoped I might have the right advice. But I did not, because I’d never faced a situation like this in the past. I was ashamed of the United States for placing any father in this situation and for the rigidity of policies that would penalize a child, only ten years old, born here in our nation and a citizen by right, by rendering his father an illegal.

  – II –

  Pineapple stepped out on the porch. Seeing that her father had begun to start the barbecue, she came across the yard and sat down at the table. I asked if she would like to stay outside and talk with me a while until the other guests, most of whom were Lara’s friends, had started to arrive.

  “I’m in the mood to walk,” she said. “Would that be okay with you?”

  I said that I’d enjoy that too.

  There was, as I’ve said, a biking trail that started just beyond the garden. So we went off along the path and soon came to the wooden bridge that crossed a broad expanse of water. Families were fishing from the bridge. Young people pedaled past. Older folks were strolling with their children or grandchildren.

  “If we walk a little ways, there’s a place where we can get a lemonade, or lemon ices, if you want.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I asked if they were like the “icies” that we used to get when she came out of school in the South Bronx.

  “Not exactly,” she replied. “More like frozen lemonade.”

  “Can you get real icies anywhere in town?”

  “Coconut icies?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They’re real hard to find. They do have them, but not in this part of town. They sell them in some neighborhoods. …”

  The shop where they sold lemonade and lemon ices was, I discovered, a good distance from her home. I asked her if she minded if we stopped and rested on one of the benches by the path.

  “Jonathan, we can turn back anytime you want. I don’t want you getting overheated.”

  I assured her I was fine.

  Pineapple had told me, back in early April, that she had been feeling “stressed” because she was taking harder courses than the year before. While we sat there resting in the shade, I asked her if she’d fill me in some more.

  The truth, she said, now that I raised the point, was not so much the difficulty of the work. “The problem is I’m still not organized—you know? The way I need to be?” And she gave me an example of something she had done at the start of the semester, which, however, I was glad to see that she reported, even at her own expense, with a sense of humor.

  “I came into one of my classes on the first day of the term and after I’d been sitting there for maybe fifteen minutes I looked around the classroom at the other students and I said to myself, ‘These are the wrong students. I know it’s my professor but it isn’t the right class.’ ”

  “What did the professor say?”

  “He didn’t say a word.”

  Finally, she said, “I just got up and took my books and I started heading for the door. When the teacher saw me leaving, he began to smile. He knew I had my schedule wrong.

  “I said, ‘Oops! Right teacher—wrong class!’

  “He thought that it was funny, since I did exactly the same thing the first semester—and with the same professor!”

  “Did you feel embarrassed?”

  “Nope!” she said. “I just told myself: ‘You still have a ways to go before this part up here’ ”—she pointed to her forehead—“ ‘learns to get you where you’re s’posed to go and when you’re s’posed to be there.’ ”

  We headed onward to the store to get our lemon ices, which had lime in them, with pulp, and were cool and tasty. As we were walking back, she told me more about the situation with her family. Her mother, she said, had made a definite decision. “She’s made her plans. She’s going back to Guatemala by the end of June.”

  “Is Miguel going with her?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I told her that her father didn’t say that it was settled yet, but she said, “It’s settled for my mother. She wants my brother with her.”

  According to the plan she and her sisters had been making, “we’ll be moving out of here and looking for a less expensive place where we can live, probably one closer to my college.” All three of them were going to get summer jobs, as she and Lara had been doing all along, which would help with moving costs and with the rent deposit and fixing up the new apartment. “It’s important to us. We need to stay together as a family. Where there’s a will … , we’ve always found the will before. We’ve been doing it a long time now.”

/>   I told her that I wondered whether all of this was going to distract her from her studies. But she was not concerned by this. “I’ve struggled for so many years nothing’s going to stop me now unless I get sick and die.”

  We stopped again on the way back, maybe a quarter-mile from her home, and sat in the shade again and watched a freighter moving very slowly toward the ocean. The setting was so pleasant and, despite the news that she had given me, she seemed so much at ease, so utterly serene and happy, that I asked her if she’d ever felt the same kind of serenity when she was living in New York.

  “Truthfully? Some of the time I did,” she said. “Not at P.S. 65, but when I was with my friends, or at home, or at St. Ann’s. I was happy most of the time. A lot of things breezed past me.

  “The only times that I got scared were, you know, if there was a shooting? Something like that? Something that was dangerous? I don’t think I ever told you that Mosquito once was shot. It happened in our courtyard.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t with a bullet. It was from a BB gun. They shot her in the eye. She still has the mark there.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “It was just a boy is all I know.”

  “Did he mean to do it? Or was it an accident?”

  “Probably an accident. She had just come home from school and was almost at our door. You remember where we lived?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And these boys, we didn’t know their names or who they were. They were up there on the roof. She didn’t feel the pain at first. All she felt was something warm coming down her face. When she put her hand up it was blood. It was coming out right here, just underneath the corner of her eye.

  “She had to have surgery. They had to cut it out of her. That’s why she has that scar. So that’s one thing that scared me. …

  “But there were shootings all the time—I mean, with real bullets—when I was that age. All the way along our street from St. Ann’s up to Cypress Ave, right next to the school. It didn’t really get to me until they hurt my sister.

  “You see, back then, I guess I thought that this was normal because it was all I knew. I had nothing to compare it to. I didn’t know when I was ten that it wasn’t like this for most other children. I didn’t start to think about this kind of thing until I was older, when I went to private school.

  “Now I understand it more because I’ve seen it from both sides and I’ve read a lot of stuff and I talk about it with my sisters. We understand there needs to be a whole lot of improvement. But for that to happen, other things, bigger things, would have to happen first. The entire attitude of white superiority would have to be attacked. You would have to start again from scratch.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning—when you go into an inner-city school, you see so many children in a class that some of them don’t even have a textbook? Or, like me at P.S. 65, you’re not allowed to take your textbook home to do your lessons or to study for exams? Meaning books should be distributed more fairly. Meaning schools should look like schools and not like jails and not be smelly places like the one I had to go to. Meaning inner cities should not have been built and need to be eliminated. That’s what I mean by ‘scratch.’ ”

  I thought to myself: “The entire attitude of white superiority would have to be attacked”!! She was still so very sweet and innocent in almost every way. But she was looking back upon her own experience with a new perspective now. She had been immersed in questions about politics in her college classes. One of her teachers in a course on sociology—“an African-American, a woman who I love,” she said—“was really smart about this stuff.”

  But more important, certainly, as she’d pointed out, was that she’d been living now for several years in a place and a milieu so different from the one in which she spent her childhood. She saw the world through different eyes and, when she spoke to me about these matters now, there was an assertiveness and sharpness in her choice of words I had never heard her use in speaking about anything that went beyond the personal. The bluntness that was very much a part of her delightful personality when she was a little girl, as in her criticism of the clothes I wore, had by no means disappeared, but it was directed more and more to matters that went far beyond her own amusements and concerns.

  As we sat there on the bench, it occurred to me to ask her something I’d been asking other students of her age since Barack Obama was elected in 2008. I started to say, “Now we have a president—” but she cut me off—“who,” she said, knowing right away where I must be heading, “happens to be black.”

  “Doesn’t that mean something might be going on?” Something in that “attitude of white superiority” she had just described?

  “Not really,” she replied.

  “You don’t think it means we’re getting closer to a point where we can start to find solutions to at least a couple of the problems you described?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Because that’s not the reason we elected him. And if he did the things he should, a lot of people who elected him, from what I understand, wouldn’t be behind him anymore. A lot of people aren’t behind him even now, and he hasn’t done a thing that I can see that will make a difference to poor children and the schools we have to go to and the places where they almost always put us, you know, in the neighborhoods, not just in New York. …”

  Once she got her teeth into a big and meaty chunk of obvious injustice she’d experienced first-hand, Pineapple clearly wasn’t going to hold back. “President Obama didn’t have to go to inner-city schools. You know? Where everyone is poor? And everyone’s Hispanic or everybody’s black? Why does he think it’s good enough for other kids, like children in the Bronx?”

  Hearing the indignation in her voice, I was reminded of other students I had known—black and Latino students mostly, but conscientious young white people too—who became so wrathful or seemed to be so overwhelmed by the sheer dimensions of the problems they perceived that they tended to give up on many good and useful things they could have done right here and now within the social system as it stands. I recalled a piece of practical advice and helpful exhortation I had heard from someone older than myself some years before: “Look for battles big enough to matter but, at the same time, small enough to win some realistic victories.”

  “Oooh! I like that!” she replied when I said it to her, and she asked if I would write it down before I left, which I promised I would do.

  “You see? That’s the whole thing that’s been in my mind. That’s why I’m sticking to my social work,” she said. “I’m going to do whatever I can with my own two hands. Comfort people after something has gone wrong. Help them when they’ve made mistakes. Help them make decisions that they won’t regret. …

  “I was given so much help when I came here to Rhode Island. One person in particular”—I think it was the teacher that she liked, the young woman who had lived on campus at her school—“made a gigantic difference in my life. Now I want to be that person in another student’s life. That’s the reason why I picked my major. That’s what keeps me going, you know? Even when I make some of the dumb mistakes I make? It’s my way of paying back.”

  I asked her if she’d given any thought up to this time as to where she’d like to work.

  “I want to say I’d like to do it in New York, most likely in the Bronx. I think that’s where they need it most. But I’m still nowheres near to being sure. I haven’t seen the worst of the United States. Well, I don’t know. I’ve never lived in any place except New York and here. I’d have to go and look around before I could decide. …

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to say. I’ve talked about this with my sisters too, and I know that they agree with me. I believe we have a major disadvantage—‘we’ as in minorities—because we start our live
s in debt. And we dig a bigger hole if we stay in college long enough to graduate.

  “Like—my parents had no money? So they couldn’t help me. Other people helped me, but I know that I’ll be starting my career with heavy bills I’ll have to pay long after I get out of school. Some kids at my college? Their parents have so much that they don’t even need financial aid and don’t have to borrow for tuition. So they’re starting out a big, big step ahead of me.

  “And I think I ought to say it isn’t just minorities. So I should correct myself. It’s everyone who’s very poor and wants to get a college education. And I think the president should change that.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I just want to say I think he ought to.”

  A boy in a biking helmet pedaled past us very fast. A group of younger children—it seemed as if Pineapple knew them—waved at us and stopped to say hello. The sun was hot, reflecting on the water.

  She asked if I was hungry.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I am too.”

  “That walk was longer than we planned.”

  “It was a good one though,” she said. “I’m glad we had this chance to talk. We’ve never had a talk like this before. … Tell me the truth. Were you surprised by what I said?”

  “Only a tiny bit,” I replied. “Well, actually, more than a tiny bit! It’s because, when we’re having fun together, I still think of you as someone very young.”

  “I am young!” Pineapple said. “Well, you know, compared to you!” Then: “Whoops! That didn’t come out like I meant.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I am old compared to you.”

  But she felt bad at what she’d said. “Jonathan, remember this. If you ever tell me that you need me, I’ll be there beside you in a heartbeat. Even when you’re really old? Don’t forget. You’ll never be more than a cell-phone call away from me.”