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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Jeremy told me he was thinking of the way the nine-year-old had touched her brother’s arm when he said that he liked pancakes and French toast.

  “ ‘He pours the syrup on!’ Why do I remember that?”

  I told him I was thinking of that too. “Maybe it was reassuring for us to be told that he enjoyed his food, that he had any appetite at all.”

  “Pour it on!” said Jeremy.

  CHAPTER 11

  No Easy Victories

  (Jeremy, Part Two)

  The college Jeremy had chosen was intimate and small, and this made it possible again for him to capture the attention of instructors. It was traditional in its course of studies and had not genuflected to the growing pressure to provide careerist training at the cost of arts and letters, which, of course, appealed to him tremendously, although it would present some difficulties for him when his studies were complete. For now, at least, it seemed that he had made a good decision.

  The first semesters were given over largely to the kinds of courses that are introductory in nature (“General Education” was the defining term). For the one elective he was allowed to take, he chose a course on cinema and theater in the modern era.

  For several weeks this was all he talked about when he called me on the phone. “Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut. … Also, Ingmar Bergman, who did The Seventh Seal. He was Scandinavian. … This week, we were looking at René Clément, who made a film called Plein Soleil—‘Purple Noon’ in English. We also saw a German film about an angel who comes down into our world, unseen at first by anyone but children, but then, of course, he falls in love, so he decides upon an action of renunciation.”

  “What does he renounce?”

  “The wings of angels,” he replied.

  “There’s a connection here to Brecht, my teacher says. In other words, this kind of work does not oblige us to suspend our disbelief. The film is just a film. The play is just a play. That’s all it is. You don’t need to believe it.”

  On another night, sometime in October: “There’s a musician named Carl Orff who put on performances in the Nazi era. He was a collaborator, I am sad to say, but he interests me enormously. He worked with classical and medieval themes. He’d find these poems by Latin writers and he’d turn them into musical theatricals.

  “ ‘Carmina Burana—that’s the title for a series of these pieces. Wait a minute.” He put the phone next to his CD player and played the section starting “O Fortuna,” then read the lyrics to me. “ ‘O fortune, like the moon, you are always changeable, ever waxing, ever waning. … ’ I don’t think you’d ever want to say that to a girl. It might hurt her feelings.

  “The person who got me into this happens to be a student here. She’s from Staten Island. I heard her play this and I loved it and went out to buy it. It sounds much better if you play it really loud but I’d be in trouble if I did that at this hour.”

  In December, he reported he was working on a paper. “It’s supposed to be on something very personal. So I decided I would do it on the school I went to in the Bronx. You know, where they put me into isolation?”

  I told him I had not forgotten and I said that I would like to read the paper once it was complete. He sent it to me when he passed it in before the holidays.

  “At this school I went to,” he began, “I felt like a loner, marching, as a certain writer put it, to the piping of a different drummer. There were a group of other students like me who presented a real problem for the faculty, so they developed an unusual approach to annihilate this problem.

  “It was five minutes before the end of yet another school day when the principal announced that changes would be made on the Monday that was coming. She avowed, ‘Many students will not be admitted to their classrooms. They will be removed and put into a separate room. We should not feel sorry for these students. They are the deviants who do not care about you or about themselves.’

  “On Monday, we were cast into a room that displayed the word ‘Confinement’ on the door. Other students on their way to classes would look in and stare at us. …

  “As for education, we were given ‘sheet work.’ It didn’t matter to them if you did it. One day I fell asleep and no one woke me up. We had no teacher in the room, just someone to guard us and make sure we didn’t leave.

  “Finally, I figured out why they were doing this. I think they hoped that some of us would get the message that they didn’t want us there, so they could be rid of us, although I’m sure the school would have denied this. Anyway, it seemed as if the principal’s new order was having this effect. Students in our little group were dropping out because their parents realized that the school had given up on them. A blemishing malformation of their minds was taking place, or had already taken place.

  “The second time I was in confinement, the students who had not dropped out elected me to go and bring their protest to the principal. I realize now that I was quite intemperate. ‘You and this cesspool of a school,’ I told her, ‘will regret this act of malice. The only deviant in this school is you. You should have put yourself into confinement.’

  “Not long after that, I left the school and transferred to a school in Massachusetts. I often wondered if I left from anger or humiliation. I now know that I left out of a wish for vindication. I have struggled ever since to show that schools should never write off any student because they regard him as an inconvenience.”

  In January, just before the end of term, Jeremy developed what he said was bad bronchitis. “The college nurse said I had a temperature of 100-plus degrees. So I couldn’t finish up a paper that I had to do for social science. The teacher says that I can turn it in next week. But I’ll be docked because it’s late.”

  I didn’t want to be unkind, but I told him I remembered, while he was at boarding school, that the many minor illnesses and accidents to which he tended to be prone seemed to coincide with times when he had essays or term papers due. He took this in good spirit. “Yes. I know the way it looks.” He said that he “repented” of this and that he’d try harder to avoid these kinds of problems in the next semester.

  His grades for the first semester were predictably uneven: A in Film and Theater, D in Mathematics, B-plus in English I, C-minus in Social Science, in which he insisted he would have received a B if it hadn’t been “for turning in that final paper late.”

  In the second semester he seemed to be more diligent in getting in his work when it was due. “In English,” he said, “I’m reading Robert Herrick, Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe. … Also Milton. Also Edmund Spenser. …

  “Oh, I forgot! Andrew Marvell also. …”

  He said he was enjoying what he’d read up to that time, except for Edmund Spenser. “Tell me the truth. Do you think that any student ever felt a thrill go up his spine reading The Fairie Queene?”

  In a philosophy course, he said, “It skips around. We start with Emerson, then go back to Plato and Aquinas, Rousseau, Descartes, Kierkegaard, et cetera. I’m writing my first paper for the course on Plato, The Republic. I thought of comparing it to Jefferson—you know, First Inaugural Address? But I’ve only got six pages. If I let myself get into Jefferson, I know I’ll never finish. …”

  In the second semester of his social science course, he said, the class was having a debate: “ ‘Are the poor responsible for poverty?’ I’m taking the positive, just to see if I can argue something that I don’t believe. … By the way, did I tell you I’ve been working in the library? Just four hours twice a week. It’s for my work-study job,” which was part of the financial package he’d received.

  In spite of the efforts he was putting in, his freshman year was hard for him. His final grades in two of his courses—math and social science—were not satisfactory. He was allowed to stay on campus and take make-up classes in the summer. He passed them both and began his second year in a hopeful state
of mind.

  Sophomore year. He didn’t call me until mid-October.

  “Hello!” he said. “Sorry that it’s been so long. I’ve been through an episode of indecision.” He said that he had had to settle on a field of concentration. “I was tempted by European history. Also sociology—it would have been for ignoble reasons. Word on campus: It isn’t too demanding. I took two courses and I found them very ‘fuzzy.’ There didn’t seem to be much focus or direction. … Anyway, I made my choice.” He had chosen English as his major, as he knew I had expected.

  That semester, he was taking British poets of the eighteen hundreds. “Romantic period. Keats and Shelley, Blake and Wordsworth, also the Victorians. You know, Robert Browning? Oh! Also A. E. Housman, who I never heard of. Oxford poet. … He reminds me of myself.”

  “Are you reading Tennyson?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you like him?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I didn’t either,” I conceded.

  “ ‘Theirs not to reason why! Theirs but to do or die!’ ”

  “At least you know the lines,” I said.

  “I do, but I repent it.”

  Instead of a midterm test, he said, students in the class had to do a long term paper—“due in three weeks, beginning of November.”

  I asked him what he’d chosen.

  “ ‘Innocence Interrupted,’ ” he replied, “because, let’s face it, most of these romantic poems, when you come right down to it, are actually about seduction.”

  He was also taking a two-semester course: “Shakespeare, plays and sonnets. Twelve plays. I don’t know how many sonnets.” He asked me a question about the Duke of Gloucester, Bolingbroke, and John of Gaunt, and seemed to be disappointed when I drew a temporary blank.

  “You wrote your Harvard thesis about Shakespeare? And you don’t remember John of Gaunt?”

  He apologized right away—“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings”—and went on to tell me of a play that he was doing with a theater group on campus. “Streetcar … ,” he said casually.

  His studies that year and the next blur together somewhat in my memory. I do remember that he called me in the spring to tell me that he planned to stay at college for a second summer to take a class on the modern novel, so that his course load wouldn’t be too heavy in the fall. He had chosen a field of concentration that wasn’t “fuzzy” in the least, and he knew the work he had ahead of him wasn’t going to be easy.

  In the winter of his junior year, he had a sad experience related to his friendship with a student in his class he had mentioned to me once before—“the girl from Staten Island,” as he called her.

  “She was the first good friend I made in my freshman year. She used to cut my hair for me. We used to go for pizza.” His room in junior year was facing hers and they made a cheerful custom out of waving to each other from their windows before bedtime.

  One weekend, she invited him to come to Staten Island to go to a movie with her and then to a party in her neighborhood. He took the train, the Metro North, from a station near the college, connected somewhere in Manhattan to get to the Staten Island Ferry, and at last, using the directions he’d been given, found his way to the place where she’d agreed to meet him.

  “Nothing was bad while were at the movie,” he reported in a somewhat frantic and embarrassed phone call that he made to me very late that night. “But when we left the theater and were walking down the street, I put my arm around her waist, because I thought that was a normal thing to do. And all at once she froze up like an icicle and pushed herself away from me as if I had offended her. It made me feel as if I was some kind of awful monster. She looked at me so meanly!

  “She said that she was going home. Or maybe she was going to the party, but she didn’t want to tell me. Anyway, she turned away and left me there. So now I’m on the ferry”—that was the first time I knew where he was calling from—“and I’m going to go back and get the train, and then I hope it’s not too late to get the Metro North to get me back to college.

  “That look in her eyes was like she found me totally repellent. It made me feel like I was unattractive. I needed to tell somebody.”

  I felt so bad I kept him on the phone until the ferry came into Manhattan.

  A short time later, he told me of a story he had written since the night on Staten Island. “I had some trouble with the title. First I called it ‘Misery.’ Then I thought that might be overstated. Now it’s titled ‘Shattered Dreams.’ ” He said this with some humor, which led me to believe his sense of hurt might have abated somewhat by that time, although I guessed that it would be a while more before it went away completely.

  Spring break. Late-night call: He told me he had seen a movie, Au Revoir Les Enfants, at a theater in Manhattan earlier that day. He said it was by Louis Malle and asked me if I knew it and I said I’d seen it many times. It was a haunting story about Jewish children who were taken by the Nazis from a boarding school in France where they were being hidden by a Catholic priest.

  “The final scene,” he said—“you know what’s ahead of them—just left me feeling hollowed out inside. …

  “I know this may seem strange to you but when I see a film like that I feel that, after all the books I’ve read and everything I think I should have learned by now, I still can’t seem to wrap my mind around the evil that we do.”

  I asked him who he meant by “we.”

  He said, “The human race.”

  In April, we had a long discussion about the comprehensives—examinations English majors had to take in senior year that encompassed the entire field. He had looked at the prerequisites and was suddenly aware of a number of works by important authors to which he’d never been exposed.

  Knowing his proclivity for running into problems at the final hour, I was glad when he decided once again to remain on campus and enroll in an intensive course on early English authors, prior to the age of Shakespeare, which he would otherwise have been obliged to take during the fall. It turned out he enjoyed it, “especially the Troilus,” which he said he liked much better than The Canterbury Tales. He said Criseyde’s cruelty to Troilus reminded him of “a certain person you may still recall. …”

  Senior year: He broke his toe. At least, that’s what he thought at first. A week later: “No more cane! They discovered that it wasn’t fractured after all.”

  This time, he didn’t let his accidents or illnesses interrupt his concentration on his work. English comprehensives were given in the winter, at the end of January. In spite of all his planning, there were still some items in the guidelines he was given for which he knew that he was not prepared. “Dr. Johnson. Also Dryden. Also Pope—Rape of the Lock. Also Coleridge. Also Yeats. Also Eliot—I never read The Four Quartets.”

  It was well into October when he told me this. I had to wonder how he could do so much reading in so short a time. Without asking his permission, I picked up the phone and called his college counselor.

  “It’s a lot for him to do,” the counselor conceded. “In some situations like this, we encourage students to stay on an extra year. In Jeremy’s case, I’ve got my fingers crossed. But we need to think of this as another option if we feel he needs it.”

  As the comprehensives neared, he was staying up late almost every night, sometimes until dawn. He told me he would fall asleep with his books beside him on his bed. He got permission to remain on campus through the Christmas holidays because he hadn’t yet completed reading Pope—“and,” he said, “you can guess who, Dryden … , ugh!”

  I told him what the counselor had said.

  “Jonathan, listen to me. I’ve made up my mind about this. I am going to graduate in June.”

  He wanted to explain to me how much it would sadden him, and disappoint him in himself, if he had to take an extra year. “In my
building in the Bronx, there were many kids—more than half of them, I’d say, maybe closer to two thirds—who didn’t finish high school. Even if they did, not many went to college. Or, if they finally got to college, most of them would not remain for long. They’d drop out. Maybe later they’d come back. … Of all the children living in that building”—it was a big building, as I’ve noted, twenty stories tall—“I can’t think of more than five who went to college and completed all their courses, and didn’t put things off, and graduated with the other students in their class.” He was convinced that, if he put it off, it would also disappoint his mother, as well as the teachers at the college who were helping him to finish up his work.

  With all these people pulling for him now, Jeremy was resolute not to let them down. As it turned out, he did not. He passed his comprehensives—“not exactly,” as he put it, “ ‘trailing clouds of glory’ ”—but he said his English teachers told him he had done “a reputable job.”

  At a moment when I should have been relieved, I’m afraid I acted like a nervous parent, worried still that something might go wrong. I felt I ought to caution him about the last few courses he would have to pass.

  “Am I crazy?” he replied. “Check it out. The answer is: I’m not.” He assured me that he knew he still had a paper to complete and (he wasn’t certain yet) either three or four exams to pass. He did the work. No last-minute spills and falls. In the end, he passed them all.

  On a day in early June, I sat beside his mother and his father, and Martha and his grandma, and watched him as he lined up with his classmates at the stairway to the platform where the trustees of the college and the faculty and president were sitting. When he was given his diploma, he stood there somewhat longer than he was supposed to, with a slightly sheepish smile on his face, and looked into the audience as if he might perhaps make out his family in the crowd.