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

by Jonathan Kozol

  “I tell them he’s my brother and I’ll deal with them myself if they ever lift a hand against him.”

  But within another year Jeremy’s mother had become alarmed about the friends his brother had been making and sent him home to Puerto Rico to live with her family there. Jeremy no longer had a brother to protect him. He was beaten several times at school and, when his pleas for help were disregarded by his teachers and his principal, he started staying out of school for three or four days in a row.

  This was no great loss to him in academic terms. And, in a kind of prideful indignation, he compensated for his poor attendance by seeking out well-educated mentors who gravitated to St. Ann’s and, in particular, a Puerto Rican poet living in the neighborhood who welcomed him into his home and talked with him for hours at a time about the books that lined his wall, immersing him in conversations about Greek and Roman history and reading him some of the famous British authors—John Milton, for example—and others he revered.

  After I’d become acquainted with the poet, a distinguished-looking man named Juan Bautista Castro, Jeremy and I spent many evenings with him at his home. At the poet’s urging, I began suggesting books to Jeremy that I thought he might enjoy, but the titles I suggested (“young adult books,” as they’re called) did not seem to interest him, or else he’d tell me he’d already read them when he was in elementary school. When I asked him what he liked, he spoke of Edgar Allan Poe, who was, he said, his “favorite writer” at the time, and he told me Poe had once resided in the Bronx, “somewhere not too far from here.” Before long, he was also reading novels of Mark Twain and, soon after that, he told me he’d been “circling Charles Dickens” but could not decide if he was “ready” for him yet.

  “My one big problem,” as he put it to me, was that he could find no bookstores near his home, “and for that matter, if the truth be told, there isn’t even any bookstore anywhere in all of the South Bronx.” The pastor—in those days he spoke of Martha as “the reverend”—had taken him to a bookstore in Manhattan where, he said, he very much enjoyed looking through the aisles for a book that he had heard of.

  “ ‘Prowling,’ ” he said, “is the word that comes to mind” when he wasn’t always positive about the book he wanted but liked to look around for something that the poet might have mentioned in their conversations. “Then I’d see it! Then I’d realize that was why I’d gone there in the first place. Check it out! I like to be surprised!”

  A year or two later, we began to go together to the Barnes & Noble store that faced directly upon Union Square, in which there were lots of sofas and secluded corners where he could sit and narrow down the books he had collected to the ones he really planned to read. I noticed that he had a rather courtly manner of enlisting the affectionate assistance of people working in the store. Young women seemed especially susceptible to his repeated pleas for help in finding books he thought that he was looking for. And when, as often happened, he asked them for a title he had gotten wrong, or for an author whose name he could not summon up correctly, they seldom seemed to get impatient with him but appeared to take a real delight in helping him untangle his confusions.

  When the time arrived for Jeremy to apply to high school, his mother was concerned and uncertain what to do, because she knew the problems of the high schools at first-hand—Jeremy’s brother had gone to a school that graduated less than a quarter of its students. He’d been on the verge of dropping out (or, if my memory is right, he may already have dropped out) when she sent him back to Puerto Rico.

  It was the spring of 1995. Word was spreading of a newly founded school in the South Bronx, one of the first of the so-called “small academies” that would become, within a few more years, the newest urban answer to the chronic failings of the larger high schools serving concentrated populations of the black and brown and very poor. Martha intervened to win a place for Jeremy, although she did not do so without reservations because of information she and I had both received indicating that the school might not be exactly what its boosters claimed. Still, any school that offered Jeremy an avenue of exit from the kind of large, impersonal, and overcrowded institution that his brother had attended seemed to her worth trying.

  The school turned out, however, not to be the richly academic institution it was said to be but was wedded to an ethos of instructional severity at the cost of intellectual vitality, with none of the expansiveness of learning or interest in the individuality of children that would be the starting point of education in a more enlightened school. A narrow emphasis on pumping up the scores on standardized exams appeared, as best I could discern, to be the top priority.

  Jeremy’s unorthodox mentality was not well suited to this school. The teachers there were not impressed with his precocity and free-roaming intellectuality. His curiosity about the world of history and poetry to which he’d been awakened by the poet who befriended him and the earnest independence that led him into writing lengthy narratives and offering discursive answers to the questions teachers asked of him—none of this endeared him to a faculty devoted to the inculcation of those skills required by test-taking.

  He would grow distracted while sitting through a class that asked for no participation from the students other than to spit up predetermined answers. He would daydream often. He’d fill his notebooks with satiric stories or eccentric questions to which he knew that no one at the school would care to give an answer. As a result, he was frequently removed from class and placed in a kind of holding room, which he called “the isolation chamber,” with other students whose behavior was regarded as resistant or disruptive and where, he said, they were given no instruction. When important visitors showed up at the school, “they quickly put us back into our classrooms.”

  When Martha learned of this, she went directly to the school and asked to see the principal. The principal told Martha that, on the basis of his noncooperative behavior and poor performance on examinations, Jeremy was not a likely candidate for college.

  Martha was, of course, unwilling to accept this. So she started reaching out, as she had done with other students from St. Ann’s, to see if she could locate some alternatives. As a short-term form of intervention, I proposed that Jeremy might benefit from a summer program at a boarding school I knew in Massachusetts that, in the normal academic year, enrolled primarily children of the affluent but, in its summer session, made an effort to enroll more children of low income.

  Jeremy’s reaction was enthusiastic. His mother, after she had seen the school and met some of the teachers—Martha, I believe, went with her and Jeremy on a day’s excursion—gave her full approval.

  He seemed to revel in the two months that he spent there. I went out twice, early in July and again a few weeks later, to get to know his teachers. His English teacher had been reading stories he had written and told me that his narrative skills were “far above grade level” and, as I already knew, that “he reads voraciously.” He did note that Jeremy “reaches out for books I should think might be rather hard for him. Sometimes they are. But sometimes he surprises me.”

  By the end of July, he was in the middle of rehearsals for a play that was to be performed in the last week of the session. I did not confess to him that I had a plan in mind—I did, however, mention this to Martha—that was a bit conspiratorial. I was toying with a notion that went beyond a single summer in New England but might open up another, more ambitious option for the future.

  It was too late to act upon this for the year ahead, so in September Jeremy continued at his high school in the Bronx. I urged him, for his own sake, to make a greater effort to conform, for now, to the demands imposed upon him. Meanwhile, he continued meeting with the poet, Mr. Castro. One evening, on Thanksgiving weekend, when the poet’s granddaughter was there, the two of them, at the poet’s instigation, read lines from Romeo and Juliet to each other. They had a good time playing with Elizabethan phrases and talking i
n Elizabethan language to one another while they were eating dinner.

  Before I left New York, we made another visit to the Barnes & Noble store where he had come to feel at home. He prevailed upon me to buy a copy of Bram Stoker’s horror novel Dracula, which, he said, he was “somewhat shocked” to learn I’d never read. I made a bargain with him. I would do my best to get through Dracula if he’d agree to buy Great Expectations and, instead of further “circling” Charles Dickens, would make a concentrated effort to complete it. He conceded to me later that he got the best part of that bargain.

  For all his seeming social ease while we were in the comfortable setting of a bookstore, there were certain things he said to me, and certain things that happened to him in the winter of that year, that were sharp reminders of the limits of his confidence. The relaxed and humorous enjoyment that he took in chatting with good-natured grown-ups in the store at Union Square, where he seemed to feel defended and protected by the pantheon of favored books and authors he had gradually created for himself, stood in contrast to his vulnerable status and physically exposed condition in the streets of his own neighborhood. The dangers that surrounded him grew very real to me when he was robbed at knifepoint one night in December.

  When I asked him where this had happened, he replied, “In my apartment building.”

  “In the lobby?”

  “No. Between two floors.”

  He explained that he was walking up to his apartment “because the elevator didn’t want to come down to the lobby.” When he turned a corner at one of the landings, he found himself surrounded by three men with knives.

  “Did you know them?”

  “No,” he said. “They weren’t from our building.”

  When I asked him what they took, he said, “My Chinese food.”

  “Did they take your money?”

  “Just one dollar. That was all I had.”

  “Did you tell your mother?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you report it?”

  “No,” he said. “That would be more dangerous.”

  “Did you tell Martha?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I asked if she would get me something I can use if I get attacked again.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Peppermint spray,” he answered.

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  He reflected on this for a moment. Then: “I said it wrong. I think the word is ‘pepper spray.’ ”

  “Is she going to get it for you?”

  “She’s still thinking.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “She does not approve of it.”

  I told him I agreed with her.

  A few months later, he called me at my home with more disturbing news. It didn’t have to do with him but with a student in his class who, he told me, was one of the only people at the school whom he regarded as a friend. The student, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been raped and strangled in the hallway of a building not far from her home. According to Jeremy, she was “advanced in all her subjects” and “a very nice person” and, he said, “maybe the nicest person you could ever want to know.” The newspapers said the building where the girl was murdered had been nearly vacant and had been infested with crack users.

  Murders and assaults, as we have seen, were not uncommon in the South Bronx at the time. A year or two before, I’d counted more than twenty children and teenagers who had died of violence within the blocks around St. Ann’s. But the victims of those crimes had not been acquaintances of Jeremy. In this case, it was his friend who was the victim.

  Toward the end of April of that year, Martha asked if I’d pursued the notion I had told her I was toying with since Jeremy returned from summer school the previous September. I told her I had kept in touch with the headmaster and had spoken with him, although only tentatively up to now, about the possibility that Jeremy might qualify as a full-time student. He had been reserved at first because he said he’d recognized in the summer session that Jeremy, while he was advanced in writing skills and reading, was well below grade level in most of his other subjects. He wanted to reflect upon it more and discuss with members of his faculty the difficulties Jeremy would face in making this transition.

  I called him now and said I’d like to talk with him in person as soon as it was possible. We set a date for the following week. When I came into his office on the day appointed, he told me he’d arrived at a decision.

  “The truth is that the school he’s now attending has not served this young man well. But we saw a spark in him, an appetite for learning, that we frankly do not always see in students who arrive here from much better schools and have had more thorough preparation at the time when we admit them. I think that he can handle it and, as tough as it may be at first, I can promise you that at this school we don’t give up on anyone too easily.”

  The school, however, did not have a large endowment. He asked me, therefore, if I could assist him in finding a potential donor to provide a scholarship for Jeremy. At Martha’s intervention, a generous and wealthy man who had worked in the administration of Bill Clinton agreed to pay for Jeremy’s tuition. As in Pineapple’s case, Jeremy’s acceptance by the school included a condition, set by the headmaster, that he must repeat a grade because the school believed he would need the continuity of three full academic years to graduate successfully.

  As summer came, his mother and the pastor made sure he would have the clothes he’d need for fall and the New England winter. The poet counseled him, in his old-fashioned and didactic way, about the effort he would need to bring to bear “to organize” his eager but “undisciplined mentality.” When the moment came to leave New York, he packed his bags and favorite books and all his treasured writings, and headed off, still a very youthful-looking boy, with that mixture of excitement and last-minute disarray I pretty much expected.

  He didn’t call me for about ten days. When he did, I could see that he was calling from another person’s number. He said the school librarian had let him use her phone.

  “She’s sitting here beside me. Would you like to say hello?” Then: “Oh no! She had to go upstairs. …

  “Anyway, I have to go, or I’ll be late for study hall.”

  He didn’t yet sound organized.

  – II –

  In the first six months of boarding school, Jeremy bombarded me with voice mails.

  “FLASH!” he said one night that fall. “I’ve been on a roll this week. Check out a book called Tender Is the Night—page 184. Also page 83. Also page 101. …”

  Another night: “Hey, Jonathan! It’s me! If you’re there, pick up! If you’re not, don’t pick up! I’m in my dorm. Writing an essay. I’ll be up ’til midnight.”

  “Actually,” he said, when I called him back, “I’m working on two essays. They’re for different classes.

  “The first one: Why do people pass the blame for things they do to someone else? I started with Adam blaming Eve who blamed the snake who probably blamed someone else. Then Pharaoh blaming the Hebrews. Then Hitler blaming the Jews. I also quoted Jesus, but not as the son of God. I said that, whether you believe in him or not, he was an important prophet and philosopher. …

  “Essay number two: I wrote about my life at home. You know, about my father? How he’s there but isn’t there? I tried to do it in a way that will not be hurtful, in case he ever reads it.

  “In history the other day we had a talk about the nineteen twenties. I found it of great interest that the Charleston and the flappers with their notoriety and a certain looseness, which is not the same as immorality, not necessarily, were all the craze just before the market crash and people jumping out of windows.

  “I asked my teacher whether it was okay to say this was ironical.”

  In November:
“A new experience this morning at assembly. We listened to a chamber group. I think it’s known as ‘an ensemble.’ ”

  “Do you know which group it was?”

  “The name escapes me,” he replied.

  “But you enjoyed it?”

  “Shall I speak the truth?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I found it very boring.”

  On a more respectful note, he told me that his English class had started reading Shakespeare.

  “Which play?” I asked.

  “Richard,” he said.

  “Richard the Second?”

  “No. The Third.”

  I told him I had never read it, so he rapidly delivered a summation of the part that he’d already read. He spoke of Richard as “a hunchback—villainous, born premature, dogs howling at his birth because he was so ugly.” He said that Richard was “tormented” and “tormenting,” “the victim of his own obsession,” and connected this with a theme familiar in the writings of his favorite author. “You’ll recall The Tell-tale Heart? There’s a line there where he talks about his own obsessive thoughts. ‘It is impossible to say how first the idea got into my brain, but, once conceived, it haunts me night and day.’

  “My teacher says it’s good for us to look for these connections. …”

  In January, he reported, students in his English class did independent essays. He had chosen “Children’s Rhymes” because his English teacher told him that a number of these rhymes originated in events of history.

  “ ‘Ring Around the Rosie,’ I’ve discovered, takes us back into the Middle Ages. ‘Ashes, ashes, all fall down’—that’s about the plague. The one in London, in the sixteen hundreds.

  “ ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall’—that’s King Richard. All the king’s men were Richard’s men. A king who lost his crown . …”