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

by Jonathan Kozol

  She gave my hand a little pat. Then we got up and went back to the party.

  On May 30, there was a text message from Pineapple on my phone: “My mother’s going back to Guatemala with my father in three weeks. My brother will go with them. More later. Talk soon. Luv, P.”

  Ten days later, the pieces of a new arrangement of the children’s lives were falling into place. The house by the water was going to be vacated by the end of June. They were planning to move into Providence, where they would live together in the year ahead, so Pineapple wouldn’t need to pay for room and board at college anymore. Mosquito would be there with them until the end of summer and then come and stay with them on holidays and weekends once the school year had begun.

  Before their parents left, however, there was one last confrontation between their father and one of the people who continued to distrust him.

  The altercation took place at Mosquito’s graduation, which followed Lara’s party by only a few weeks. One of the women who disliked her father, Pineapple reported, stopped him in his tracks close to the commencement stage after graduation, while he was chatting with the parents of Mosquito’s friends.

  “I could tell she was going to upset him. I was standing next to him. She told him that he wasn’t a good father because he was ‘abandoning’ his children, and when he tried to answer her, he began to stutter and I saw that he was trembling. We tried to get away from her, but she kept right on and followed us until we got into the car.

  “As soon as we got home he went into his bedroom. He was sitting on the bed with his hands over his eyes and he was still trembling. We could see that he was crying. He kept repeating what the woman said to him, that he wasn’t a good father. We told him, ‘No. It isn’t true. We love you.’ But he kept on crying.”

  In her recollection of this incident, which she didn’t talk about until her parents and her brother had gone back to Guatemala, she went into detail to explain to me why she looked upon her father as a man of dignity who would never willingly have done harm to his children. “Since they’ve been gone he’s spoken to us almost every night. He taught himself to work on a computer, so we can see each other when we talk. The only nights that we don’t talk are when they have a bad storm, because it’s the rainy season down in Guatemala now and when it’s raining very hard there’s no electric power in the town.”

  She also said that, in the years when they were living in the Bronx, her father periodically went back to Guatemala because “he needed to check up on a house that still belongs to us.” Every time one of the children had been born, she said, he would scrape together all the money that he had to buy them each a plot of land adjacent to the house, “so each of us would know we had a little piece of something of our own. Something to connect us. … So, if we ever wanted, we would have a place we could return to.”

  As purely symbolic as this may appear, it struck me as consistent with their father’s longing to be certain that the children wouldn’t lose all sense of contact with their place of origin. Since they were young, Pineapple said, he had told them many stories of the village where he had been born, to keep alive that feeling of connectedness. In the winter after he and Isabella had returned to Guatemala, Pineapple went there for a Christmas visit. She told me that the village felt familiar. “I didn’t feel as if I was a stranger.”

  This, then, was the man who did not love his children and deserved to be humiliated and insulted in their presence on a day that should have been a happy celebration. Pineapple said the woman who had hounded him into the parking lot, and then to the car in which he’d taken refuge, had never been somebody with whom she and Lara felt entirely comfortable. Especially as they grew old enough to tell her when they disagreed with some advice she’d given them, the woman would get “very cranky and impatient” with them. “She didn’t really ‘give advice,’ you know? It was more like—giving us ‘instructions’? You know, like we weren’t supposed to use our little brains to make decisions of our own?”

  I don’t know enough about the to-and-fro between them to be certain this is fair, but I wondered if this person had perhaps unconsciously arrogated to herself the privilege of judging them according to the values of her class and culture, but without regard for theirs. Most of the people in Rhode Island who had been defenders of the children since they had arrived were too enlightened to deny the girls a sense of their autonomy and too sensitive to make the kinds of statements that no child wants to hear about her father or her mother. These were the people, by and large, who seemed to be the most aware of the dynamics between benefactors and their beneficiaries and most willing, as a consequence, to examine those inevitable biases that none of us can totally avoid.

  – III –

  Lara and Pineapple showed a lot of ingenuity and practicality in making the transition from the house where they’d been living to the new apartment they had found in Providence. In order to raise money for the rental and the furnishings, they organized a yard sale for belongings they would not be taking with them. Members of the church donated items too. In a single afternoon, they raised $3,000.

  “We got the apartment for a good price,” Lara told me. “I used $2,000 from the yard sale to pay the landlord in advance toward the first year’s rent, which cuts the monthly payments to about $500.”

  The apartment was small: kitchen, living room, bath, and bedroom. But it had two beds and a pull-out bed and, she said, there were cabinets between them that functioned as dividers and also as bed tables. “We used the money we had left to pick out linens, quilts, and curtains and, you know, all the stuff we needed for the kitchen.”

  Lara began working at a day care center in July—“ten dollars an hour, until I get more training. I’m putting off my master’s for two years because we’ll need as much as I can earn. Once Pineapple’s done with college, I’ll go back to grad school so I can be certified.” She still intended to become a teacher.

  Mosquito, meanwhile, had been hired as a counselor at the prep school she and Miguel and Pineapple had attended. “Good pay,” Pineapple noted. “Next year, she’ll be co-director.”

  Pineapple’s job did not pay as well, “but it was the best that I could find, being as I waited for too long.” She was doing check-out at a local supermarket. “You know, we need every bit of money we can get.”

  She sent me e-mails in July and August, most of them light-hearted. “Heyyyy, Jonathan! Lara had a party for her friends last night. Stayed up with them really late. Definitely do need sleep. Luckily, it’s Sunday.” She said her mother’s health was “good”—she wasn’t having headaches anymore and her arthritis seemed to be less painful than before, perhaps because of warmer weather. Her father was “good.” Her brother was “good.” But she missed them badly.

  Mosquito’s job, she told me, would be ending in mid-August, after which she’d be heading off to college since the freshmen had to be there early. “You know? Orientation? Anyway, she wants to be there soon enough to get a single room and there aren’t too many. I wish I’d had a single room when I was a freshman.”

  In September Lara was promoted. “They made her the ‘lead teacher’ for the younger children,” Pineapple said, “so she’s making better money than before.” Pineapple was getting ready for her junior year. …

  She kept in touch with me throughout the fall and winter. I saw her once in Providence when I returned there for a teacher meeting. She also came to Cambridge once—it was in the first week of December—to spend a weekend at the house in which my assistant lived and where student interns often stayed a few months at a time. It was a big old-fashioned house, big enough for me to isolate myself when I was immersed in writing, and there was a long and narrow stairway from the second floor to a garret where there were two extra bedrooms for our visitors.

  As soon as she walked in, she wanted to check out the house, examine all the decorations and the pictures on
the walls, take a peek at every room, and look at all the messages (like “more cheese and brownie mix”) taped to the refrigerator door. She was disappointed to observe that I was using wooden crates, turned upside down, for tables in the living room, since I hadn’t had the time to furnish it completely. She said that she’d be “more than glad” to go to the store with me anytime I asked to help me find a comfortable sofa and end tables.

  She wasn’t in a serious state of mind at all. For her it was a holiday. My assistant, Lily, who is only three years older than Pineapple, took to her immediately. The first idea that came into their minds was to take off to a store—Target, of course—that both of them, for reasons I can’t understand, regarded as an ideal destination for an early afternoon. They insisted that I come with them but when we walked into the store, they behaved at first as if they had forgotten I was there.

  Heading for the section of the store where women’s clothes were sold, Pineapple went to work picking out some sporty-looking skirts and jerseys she thought Lily ought to buy. “This one would look cute on you,” she’d say. Lily looked at dresses she thought Pineapple might like. They took things down, held them up against each other, and then put them back. Neither of them could make up their minds.

  Once we had escaped the women’s section, Pineapple took me by the arm and steered me from one aisle to the next as she examined kitchenware and DVDs and table lamps and picture frames and sweet-smelling lotions and bath towels and small scented candles, and then, swerving back into a section for young ladies’ wear, she looked at slacks and sweaters and a long bright-colored coat. But when I asked her, “Would you like to buy that?” she kept saying, “No. It’s not exactly what I had in mind.” And, in the end, neither she nor Lily purchased anything! In the car, I asked if she was disappointed. She said, “Not at all.” The whole idea of going to the store wasn’t to buy anything particular, as she explained this patiently to me, but simply “to hang out there.”

  The following day, while I was sleeping late, she and Lily went back to exactly the same store. The only thing Pineapple bought was a set of linen napkins for the kitchen table of our house, Irish linen, lime-colored, “to go with the yellow walls,” she said. It was a gracious thing for her to do—she had very little money, and she had bought nothing for herself.

  The first night she was there, Lily took her up into the garret, where she’d made a bed for her with new sheets and pillows and a comforter. Pineapple seemed pleased at first, but five minutes later she came down and said it was “too spooky” to sleep up there all alone. So Lily spent the night, and the next one, sleeping on the other bed to keep her company.

  On Sunday night, after we had dinner at the kitchen table, she was in a thoughtful mood and talked a little more about her hopes for her career. She reminded me that when she was in elementary school, she used to think she’d “like to be a baby doctor”—or, as she worded it tonight, “go into pediatrics.” She said the idea “kind of stuck with me” until she was in boarding school. But when she talked about this with her counselor, he told her that he wasn’t sure her science skills were strong enough to do a pre-med major when she went to college. “It was not like he was ‘downing’ me. If I wanted, he said I should try.

  “Then I thought about it more and I explained to him that all I really wanted was to be in a career where I could do something to change the lives of children, to be of help to children. And people always used to say I should be a social worker. Long ago! People used to say this when I was a little kid. Back there at St. Ann’s. …” The counselor, she said, encouraged her in this, and by the time she was in her senior year she’d made up her mind.

  I repeated something she had said when we were walking by the water on the day of Lara’s graduation. She’d told me that she thought of this as a way of paying back the people who had helped her through the years. But she answered that she’d thought about this more.

  “I realize now that I can never pay back everyone who helped me. You can’t pay back for something in the past. What I want to do is be able to pay forward. Like, you know, Dr. King said this? Or somebody said this. Or something like this? ‘Pass the torch along’? That’s kind of what I mean: Do it for the younger ones. The ones I left behind. …

  “So that’s what I decided. That’s how I settled on my major. And you know it hasn’t been too easy. I have to study harder than most students in my class. It’s the truth. I’m not embarrassed. It’s been that way for me all along. But I know that I can do it. Like I told you, I don’t think there’s anything that can slow me down.”

  In the spring she reported that her little brother would be coming back to go to school in Providence. “We’re looking for a school that’s close to our apartment. We’re going to make sure it’s a really good one. You know? He’s a whole lot smarter than I am. I can say it. He’s my brother. I’ve already told him that he has to go to college.”

  She also told me she’d be coming back to visit us in Cambridge for another weekend soon. “Heyyyy Jonathan!” she said in one of her e-mails. “Don’t be worried. I won’t make you go to Target with me this time. There’s other things I’d like to see. Like we’re reading Walden now? Is that little house still there? By the way, my grades are gooood!! I can’t wait to see you guys.

  “Lots of luvvvvv! Pineapple.”

  CHAPTER 10

  A Life of the Mind (Jeremy, Part One)

  He loved books.

  He wrote poetry.

  He wrote long stories.

  He had a liking for old-fashioned language and inverted phrases.

  “Be not offended,” he told me once when he disagreed with something I had said.

  He was unlike any child I had ever known.

  Jeremy was twelve years old when I met him at St. Ann’s in 1993. He walked right up to me and offered me his hand. “Sir,” he said, “I understand you are an author. I, too, am a novelist.” He told me, in fact, that he was working on a novel at that very time.

  Shortly thereafter, he handed me a story, twenty-two pages, a complicated mystery, which he said he hadn’t yet completed because he hadn’t figured out the ending.

  “How long,” he asked, “does a story have to be for it to be a novel?”

  I said I didn’t know if there was a rule about this.

  “Is twenty-two pages long enough?”

  “That may be a little short.”

  But I didn’t want to spoil his enthusiasm, so I added, “It’s a good beginning.”

  He seemed relieved to hear this.

  Jeremy lived on the sixteenth floor of a badly run-down twenty-story building, with his mother and his older brother, five blocks from the church. His mother was very poor and unable to speak English, but she had a strong and self-reliant spirit and she made a good home for her children. Jeremy’s father, from whom his mother was divorced, lived in the same neighborhood. His grandmother lived nearby as well. Jeremy would stay with her when his mother now and then returned, sometimes for a month or so, to the town where she was born in Puerto Rico.

  The pastor told me Jeremy was more religious than most children of his age. He read the Bible. He knew his prayers. He understood the liturgy. He believed in God. And his sense of faith and his understanding of the meanings of the gospel in his daily life did not, she said, abandon him when he left the church.

  One afternoon, a few weeks after we had met, he took me for a walk to see the building where he lived. His mother wasn’t home, so we didn’t go upstairs. We stopped at a corner store, where I got a cup of coffee, and then headed back in the direction of St. Ann’s. As we were walking, Jeremy suddenly looked across the street and gestured at a man with short gray hair staring at a vacant lot and said it was his uncle, who was suffering from AIDS. The man looked up when he heard his nephew call his name, but seemed to be confused and did not react. He stood there on the sidewalk with a
razor blade in one hand, carefully held between his forefinger and thumb, and a cigarette in the other. When Jeremy introduced us, his uncle dropped the razor blade in order to shake hands. After an awkward moment, he nodded and went on.

  “Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?” Jeremy asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Jesus wept,” he answered.

  Jeremy spent his grade-school years at P.S. 30, whose principal, Miss Rosa, was something of a maverick in her progressive views but also ran a tight ship and was able to retain a good deal of continuity within a seasoned faculty. But the middle school he was attending at the time we met was one of those dismal places I’ve described that would have been shut down many years before if it had been serving a middle-class community. The principal, when I went to meet him, appeared to be annoyed when I asked him about Jeremy and, indeed, he told me that he couldn’t find him listed in his records. After he reluctantly went through his files once again, he seemed to remember who I meant.

  “Is he the one with pimples?”

  Jeremy was mild-mannered—he was not assertive in dealing with his peers—and he was bullied often by the more aggressive students at the school. The principal was not the sort to offer him protection. Then, too, Jeremy stood out from his classmates by reason of the fact that he was an introspective boy and, when he did speak out in class, tended to ask questions that his teachers found obscure—and would sometimes tell him so—which presented yet another opportunity for students to make fun of him.

  “He’s not like any of the other kids you see around the neighborhood,” his older brother said. “He walks along the street buried in one of his books. He goes by these places where the dealers and their friends hang out on the corners. It’s like he’s in a different world. …” Jeremy’s brother was seventeen by then and, even though he had not allowed himself to get involved with criminal activities, he was well acquainted with the ones who were.