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

by Jonathan Kozol

  He also had opinions about certain rhymes he didn’t think we ought to read to children. “ ‘This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none.’ Why do we want to rub it in? Why would we want to tell these things to children?

  “ ‘Lady Bug, Lady Bug’ is pretty awful, too, if you think about the words. ‘Your house is on fire. Your children are gone.’ Is that the sort of thing we really want to read to kids before they go to sleep?

  “ ‘When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Down comes the baby, cradle and all. …’

  “No wonder children have bad dreams!

  “ ‘Itsy-bitsy spider, climbing up the spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain. Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again. …’

  “It’s like Sisyphus. He’s never going to succeed. You end up feeling kind of sorry for the spider.”

  I asked what got him into writing about something so unusual.

  “Once my teacher set me off,” he said, “I kind of kept on rolling. I went to the librarian. She was a great help to me. I found a lot of writing on this subject.

  “Anyway, my teacher liked the paper.”

  In March I drove out to the school so that I could talk more with his teachers. His English teacher made the point that in his essays Jeremy was temperamentally resistant to conciseness. “In his papers he will seldom find the shortest line from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ He relies on finding nuggets of excitement to string out his writings, which is what enlivens them but also makes it very hard to grade him.”

  “Trying to find exactly where he’s heading,” I remarked, “is something like a treasure hunt.”

  “At least the treasure’s there,” the teacher said.

  I’d been invited to have dinner at the school, but Jeremy had asked permission to go into town with me to a pizza restaurant that was popular with students. On the way, he asked if we could stop first at a stationery store that was near the restaurant. He said he’d bought a picture as a present for his mother—it was a reproduction of a print by Rembrandt—but that he forgot to buy a frame. We stopped at the store. He had the money crunched within his hand. He picked out an inexpensive wooden frame, and then we went for supper.

  We didn’t have much time to eat because his theater class was doing a rehearsal of a play—The Inspector General. As we came in, other students filled him in on changes they had made. “Oh no!” he said, but then assured them, “It’s okay.” I stayed to watch the beginning of the play, then headed back to Boston.

  Spring break: He met me in Manhattan. We went to a different bookstore for some reason, not the one in Union Square. When we left and went down in the subway, we got confused and took the wrong train—the Number 5 train, not the Number 6—to go back to the Bronx. We got off at Third Avenue and had to walk for several blocks.

  As we walked, he told me of a story he had just completed for his school newspaper. The story was about the poet, Mr. Castro, but he hadn’t turned it in because, he said, he was “having problems” with a couple sentences.

  “If you were writing a story,” he asked, “and you said a character was ‘senile’ and ‘simpatico,’ do you think the person would consider that a compliment?”

  “Simpatico,” I said, was certainly a compliment, but I told him it would not be flattering to say that somebody was “senile.”

  “What does ‘senile’ mean?”

  I was surprised he didn’t know. When I told him, he said, “Oops! I think I have to fix it.”

  Rain had started. The two of us were getting soaked, but he seemed oblivious to this and kept on asking questions. “Have you ever heard of people,” he inquired, “who walk into the middle of the street and throw themselves in front of cars?”

  I told him that I’d never heard of people who actually had thrown themselves in front of cars but that I’d seen stories in the paper about people who would go to court and pretend they had been injured by a car, or on the train, or at the place they worked.

  “That’s what I had in mind,” he said.

  “Do you know the reason why they do it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think the word is … ‘damages.’ ”

  “Damages—for what?”

  He reached slowly for the word and finally answered, “Trauma.”

  “Where did you hear that word?”

  “One of my teachers,” he replied.

  “Did you ask him what it means?”

  “He said to look it up.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Something that happened to you once,” he said, “and it affects you later on.”

  “Is that what the dictionary says?”

  “Something like that,” he replied. “But right now”—tapping on his head—“I’m giving you my own opinion.”

  It turned out he wasn’t going to his mother’s house but was going to sleep over at his grandma’s. At the front door of the building, as he was about to press the buzzer, he squinted up into the sky, in which the rain was coming down much harder now. He suggested that I come upstairs to get dried off and “have a cup of soup” and “meet my grandma and my cousin.”

  I told him that I didn’t think I had the strength to get into a conversation with his family at this hour.

  “Jonathan, I promise you that ‘conversation’ will not be a problem.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “You won’t understand a word they say! None of them speak English.”

  When I said that I’d feel kind of strange to sit there and not talk to anybody in the room, he looked at the rain again but finally pressed the button to release the door. Even then, he held the door and watched me as I headed down the street in the direction of Brook Avenue. …

  On my final visit to the school that year, I drove out early in the afternoon to talk with the headmaster. He said that Jeremy was doing “reasonably well,” although his grades in math were poor—“marginal at best.” He did observe that Jeremy seemed to have “inordinate amounts” of very minor health complaints or “curious small accidents” that coincided closely with the days when he had papers due. “When students pass in papers late, if it happens frequently, teachers sometimes dock them by a grade or two.” He said he didn’t see this as a matter of immense concern and urged me not to speak of it with Jeremy for now.

  I stayed on campus late enough to meet with Jeremy before he went to study hall. We were sitting on the front steps of the library, with the dorms behind us and the playing fields and countryside below. I took the opportunity to ask him something that was often in my mind ever since he had arrived here for the first semester. Beneath the cheerfulness that was apparent when he spoke about the friendships he was making and the obvious excitement he was taking in his literary classes and another theater course, I asked him if he ever felt displaced at all to be within this academic setting and this small New England village, so far from New York.

  He thought about his answer before saying, with a prior qualifier that he often used in order not to give offense, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy here. I like my teachers very much.” He said he liked his English teacher in particular. “But there’s a certain word you know. …”

  He said this with a look that seemed to presuppose I’d know the word he meant, then hesitated, so I asked, “What word?”

  “The word is ‘home.’ And home, for me, is where my mother is.”

  For a moment, he looked very lonely.

  I asked him, “Do you ever cry?”

  “I’ve taken a policy not to cry,” he answered. “But if you ever see me weep, you will know that it’s because I’ve hurt my mother’s feelings.”

  His love for his mother was at the core of his exist
ence. The fear that she might ever undergo a feeling of abandonment was in his mind continually.

  In the fall of 1998, his second year at boarding school, he told me that his class was doing European history. “Modern history. League of Nations, rise of the dictatorships, Mussolini, genocide in Germany, equivocation of the French … , Ribbentrop and Molotov, Chamberlain, et cetera. … Oops! Sorry! I forgot one other minor thing. The Russian Revolution.”

  In the spring, he reported, they were doing U.S. history, but he said, “It’s not in strict chronology. I mean, it’s not in sequence. Like, the teacher wants us to examine certain themes. This month, for instance, we’re into race relations, starting from the Civil War and up until these present days.

  “And we had a speaker here. Someone that you know. His name was Robert Coles. Dr. Coles, I ought to say. I saw a sadness in his eyes. I went up to speak with him.”

  I picked up with interest on his words.

  “What did that look of sadness mean to you?” I asked.

  “A man with nothing false about him,” Jeremy replied. “He doesn’t hide his feelings. Transparency? Sincerity? Am I using the right words?”

  In the same semester he had a course in which his teacher introduced the class to Aeschylus, Euripides—“and, you know, the other Greek tragedians. Then we did some modern authors such as Shaw and Pirandello. Also Strindberg. Also Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill.”

  Near the end of the spring, he went on, “my theater teacher brought us to New York. We saw three plays, one by O’Neill—it was The Iceman Cometh.

  “I don’t know what to say. Some of the students didn’t like it but, to me, it was like it pretty near destroyed me. …”

  While he was in New York, he said, “No surprise—you know me! I went back to B & N. I was looking at a book about Polanski.”

  The name had slipped away from me. He reminded me Polanski was a film director—“very controversial.”

  He said he finally bought the book and went outside. “But then, ten minutes later, I went back and said I’d changed my mind and asked if I could have my money back. The cashier said, ‘Is there a reason why?’ I told her, ‘I just thought that I was ready for this, but I’m not.’ ”

  I asked him if she seemed surprised by this.

  “No,” he said. “She was sincere. She looked at me with understanding eyes.”

  He said he had to fill a form out to explain why he returned it.

  “What did you write?”

  “The same thing I said to the cashier.”

  “You wrote that down?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” I could not explain to him why it struck me as amusing that he’d written out an explanation that was quite so personal. …

  October of his senior year: The headmaster told me he had no question in his mind as to whether Jeremy would graduate. It was time, he said, to start to think of colleges.

  A month later, when parents ordinarily would travel with their children for meetings with admissions officers, or for formal interviews, one of the older teachers at the school offered to drive with Jeremy to several colleges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The counselor’s home was close to Boston, so he invited Jeremy to stay there with his family on some weeknights and extended weekends, which would make it easier to visit several campuses that were clustered in this area or only a short drive away.

  But, in the end, after all his visits to New England colleges, he told me he’d decided that he wanted to be closer to his home. He settled on a college in one of the outer suburbs of New York, about an hour’s train ride from the Bronx. Strong letters of support from his teachers and headmaster and a successful interview proved to be decisive. In spite of his uneven grades, he was granted a financial package that included a large scholarship.

  Once his college plans had been assured, Jeremy enjoyed his final months at school. His theater group did one last play. His English teacher and his wife took him out to dinner twice. But he was increasingly thinking about home.

  – III –

  In the weeks after his graduation, he called to tell me he was “catching up on things I didn’t know about at home” or “that I forgot to ask about” in the final months at school. Most of them were pleasant things—about his mother and his grandma, and his father’s sister, who was visiting from Florida but had left soon after he returned. A cousin that he didn’t like had been staying in his bedroom, but he said that he was “very happy to report” that “this unpleasant person has gone back to Puerto Rico.”

  All the news, however, was not cheerful. One evening in the summer, he called to tell me of some information he’d been given by his mother. His voice was sad. His words were plain. No prefatory ambiguities. No linguistic games.

  “It concerns a little boy who has the HIV. I knew this boy since he was born. He’s the cousin of my nephew on my uncle’s side. …

  “And there’s just one other thing—he’s not alone in this. He has an older sister and she has the HIV infection also, and she takes the same three medicines her brother has to take.

  “Their mother has the sickness too. She’s in Lincoln Hospital. So they’ve been living with their old grandmother. Every time their mother leaves the hospital, my mother says she goes back to the street. You know the market at Hunt’s Point? That’s where she goes. My mother says that she’s infecting other people now.”

  His mother also told him that the younger of the children was more advanced in illness than his sister. “The doctor said the little boy might only have another year. Jonathan, I have to go and visit with this boy. Would you go there with me?”

  It was early August then. I told him I’d be in New York for the week preceding Labor Day and promised I would go with him.

  We met at 59th Street and took the train that went to Yankee Stadium, which was near the children’s home. The boy was standing near the door when we came in, but leaning on a chair. He was wearing shorts and sneakers and a jersey and was playing with a yo-yo, although in a desultory way. Seven years old, a light-skinned boy, very pale, he spoke almost inaudibly. He had been in first grade the preceding year, when he went to school at all. But his teachers didn’t feel that he had learned enough, or was well enough, to move on with his class. So he’d be in the first grade again.

  The older child, nine years old, who had responded more successfully to treatment, seemed to lead an almost normal life. She liked school, liked her teachers, liked to dance, had a lot of music videos. She said she loved a singer named Marc Anthony, whose salsa music and good looks—“he’s so cute!”—had made him very popular with girls and, as I gather, grown-up women too. She chattered gaily about unimportant matters while the grandmother, who was in her fifties but looked older, moved slowly through the living room and dining room and kitchen in a grim and patient way, a solemn and somewhat foreboding figure.

  The grandmother opened the refrigerator door, at my request, and showed me where she kept the children’s medicines—Retrovir and Epivir were two that I had seen before in homes of other families in the Bronx—and then excused herself because, she said, she had been feeling ill and needed to lie down.

  The children sat with Jeremy and me around a table in the dining room. The nine-year-old was talking about things she liked to eat. Her favorite things, she said, were Chinese food, McNuggets, and SpaghettiOs. She said she liked fried chicken too but it was “a mess to eat—your fingers get too greasy,” with which Jeremy agreed. The boy said that his favorite things were pancakes and French toast.

  “He pours the syrup on!” his sister said, touching his shoulder gently.

  She said that he liked Sesame Street, and a program known as Zoom (which has since gone off the air), and he still watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—and she said that she still watched it too. The child brightened up w
hen she said Mr. Rogers’ name. He whispered in a hoarse but almost cheery voice, “The Land of Make Believe!”

  I told them I had visited the studio in Pittsburgh once and saw The Land of Make Believe and got a close look at the trolley. The nine-year-old asked me if I’d also seen the closet in which Mr. Rogers used to put away his coat and shoes and find his sneakers and his sweater. I told her that I hadn’t seen the closet but I saw his sweater because Mr. Rogers had it on when I was there.

  Jeremy asked the little boy if he knew Mr. Rogers’ song about the “neighborhood.” The child said he did. So Jeremy leaned across the table to the boy and hummed the song, inviting him to sing. He didn’t have the strength to sing so Jeremy sang the words instead. The child smiled and tried to sing the final words himself.

  Jeremy had said he viewed it as an obligation to visit with the children, but it didn’t feel like something dutiful while we were there. And, once the taciturn and brooding older woman had excused herself to go upstairs, the mood within the dining room took on a little of the normal lightness that is common among children who are relishing the final days of summer before they go back to school.

  When we left, we decided not to take the train, and so we walked the fifteen blocks to get back to St. Ann’s. Jeremy was quiet. He asked me only a few questions in regard to possibilities he’d heard about that had to do with “cures for HIV”—or, as he quickly edited his words, “not really cures,” but “cures that make you almost well and almost like a healthy person for a while.”

  I told him I believed that he was right. There was no cure for HIV but, as best I understood, there were medications coming out of research that seemed to have had promising results in countering the symptoms that had ravaged HIV-infected people up to now. The nine-year-old, who seemed so energetic that I wouldn’t have suspected she was ill if I had not been told, might very likely live for many years—long enough to benefit from these medications. The little one appeared to be less likely to survive because his strength already was so low. Still, as I said to Jeremy, there was no way to know. Perhaps, with one more miracle, one more advance in research, one more medication that had not yet been approved but was in the testing phase for now, he might prevail as well.