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

by Jonathan Kozol

  His mother brushed her hand across her eyes. Her pride in him was limitless.

  – II –

  In the pressures of the final months of school, Jeremy had had no chance to look into the future and think about a way he might support himself after graduation. Suddenly now, he had to make some practical decisions.

  Thousands of other students every year—unless their college studies have been highly job-specific—face the same dilemma. But I think it may have been more difficult for Jeremy because his fascination with questions of morality and history and the passion that had stirred in him so many years before when he discovered Edgar Allan Poe and then, as he had put it, started “circling” Charles Dickens—the very qualities, indeed, that brought him to my notice and that of his pastor when he was twelve years old—refused to be extinguished on the day he was awarded his degree.

  He was writing less, but continued reading deeply. British history continued to intrigue him. He also grew attracted to the history of Puerto Rico, a subject he had seldom talked about before. He told me of the decimation of the native population, who were known as the Taínos and had lived in Puerto Rico prior to its subjugation by the Spanish, then by the United States. This, in turn, led him into reading more and more about the exploitation of the Caribbean and the Latin nations over the past century by various American administrations.

  Contemporary politics in the United States preoccupied him too. This interest had begun while he was still in college during the contested electoral decision in November of 2000. He had since been following political events in New York and Washington more closely. He’d call me now and then, almost always late at night, to tell me something in the news that made him angry or that he found perplexing, or simply something that he thought I might find of interest.

  Meanwhile, like a number of the other students who’d been active at St. Ann’s when they were much younger, he was working with the children who came to the summer session at the church, a very solid and intensive program in which he was teaching history and reading. Late in the summer, he told me for the first time that he’d started thinking he might like to be a teacher.

  I rejoiced to hear this because I’d seen how easily and comfortably he related to the children he was teaching at St. Ann’s. And I had not forgotten the very gentle, empathetic way he had leaned across the table to the child who had AIDS and elicited at least a spark of energy and brought a smile to that child’s eyes. I also thought the tribulations he had undergone while he was in middle school and high school in the Bronx would help him to identify more closely with young people who had never had the opportunities he’d subsequently received. The problem, however, as in the case of Lara, Pineapple’s older sister, was that nothing in his education gave him the credentials to teach in a public school, for which, of course he needed to be certified.

  As a temporary measure, after doing some investigation, he found there was an opening into the world of teaching, marginal though it may be, in the form of private programs operated by some corporations that contracted with the public schools to offer children preparation for those all-important standardized exams that were now mandated by the state, and for which a tutor did not need certification.

  He got a job with one of these companies, which he, of course, regarded as “the wildest of ironies” since he hated tests like these and, when he had been a student at the high school in the Bronx, before he went to boarding school, had generally failed them. “Whenever I went into those bubble tests,” he told me once, “I knew that I was done for. Number 2 pencils! The points would always break. …”

  Still, he needed money. And, as much as he disliked the single-minded emphasis on pumping test results, he told me he was “slipping in a lot of stuff I’m not supposed to use”—reading children’s stories to his students, having them keep journals, helping them write stories of their own—because the programmed lessons he was given were, he said, “so deadly dull” and the supervision was so poor that “no one seems to notice anyway.”

  He was living with his mother now and used part of the very modest pay he was receiving to help her with expenses and, now and then, to treat her to some luxuries (an evening in Manhattan, for example) that she would otherwise have been unable to enjoy.

  One summer day, a year after he’d gotten out of college, he told me he would like to bring her up to Boston because she was fond of music and he thought that she would like to see the Boston Pops performing by the river on the Esplanade. In the afternoon, he planned to show her the historic sites—“you know,” he said, “the Old North Church, Faneuil Hall”—that his class had visited when he was in boarding school.

  “We’re coming on the Chinese bus,” he told me on the night before. (The Chinese bus, a bargain ride, was used by students often when they traveled between Boston and New York.) “Very cheap. Sixteen dollars. We’ll be getting in by noon. I’m hoping we can see you.”

  I met them around five o’clock at the public library, an historic building facing Copley Square. His mother, I was glad to see, had not been as thoroughly exhausted as I had expected by Jeremy’s determination to bring her with him all the way up the steeple of the Old North Church to see the spot where the lanterns had been lighted in the famous Longfellow poem about the ride of Paul Revere.

  We went for dinner to a place in Cambridge that I thought his mother would enjoy. He persuaded her to have a glass of cool sangria outside on the terrace of the restaurant before we went inside to eat. We ended up talking for so long that Jeremy at last inquired of his mother whether she would mind if they didn’t go back into town to hear the concert, even though this had been the major reason why they came to Boston in the first place. His mother said she’d be relieved because, as Jeremy translated this to me, “She says that it’s too much for her. The crowds there will be terrible.”

  So we stayed there at the restaurant and had dessert and coffee, and then I drove them into Boston just in time for them to catch the bus that left at 10:00 p.m. He told me the next evening they didn’t get back to the Bronx until after three o’clock. “We had to take the subway. As you will recall, there aren’t too many trains around that hour.” He said his mother slept until the afternoon.

  “It was a good visit. Check it out. I’m glad we caught you when you were in Boston. My mother’s very happy, which is what I wanted.”

  Throughout this time, he continued thinking about teaching, not in an ancillary situation for a test-prep corporation, but as a teacher—“you know, a real teacher”—in the schools themselves. I recommended that he might begin by taking a short course of study to become a classroom aide, “a paraprofessional” in the language of the public schools. But Jeremy resisted this. “I want to be a teacher, not a ‘helping’ teacher,” and for this, he knew, “I need to get credentials.”

  I admired his persistence in adhering to his ultimate objective. But I honestly did not believe he was ready yet to undertake the concentrated regimen of study this was going to entail. I had the sense, although I didn’t say this to him in so many words, that his strictly academic energies had been more depleted than he realized by the final push he had had to make to graduate from college, after having been obliged to drive himself so very hard throughout his years at boarding school.

  Nonetheless, he was resolved to give it a good try. He applied successfully to a teacher-training college in New York that had classes in the evening, so that he could keep on earning money in the daytime at his present job. And, at least in the beginning, he threw himself right into it. Before long, new vocabularies and new concepts bubbled up into our conversations. “Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. Children learn by imitation. Baby’s in her crib. When her Mama waves good-bye, baby starts to understand that this means she’s leaving. Then the baby starts to wave good-bye as well. … He saw a child moving through four stages. Erikson extended this beyond the childhood years. …
Now we’re going to begin Vygotsky. …”

  But, at the end of two semesters, he confessed to me that he found he wasn’t in a state of mind to get into the tightly packed curriculum the program called for. He also said the heavy emphasis on metrics in the training program—“measurement of student progress” and the like—had frightened him because he’d never really overcome the math anxiety that had afflicted him since middle school. He conceded in the end that he could not handle it for now.

  The disappointment of his premature and unsuccessful venture into teacher education obviously unsettled him and, I know, embarrassed him. He had taken a long journey and had won so many other victories up until this time. Now, after all the hurdles he had overcome, he found that he was locked into a sense of stasis, unable to achieve a goal that stubbornly eluded him.

  “I wanted to become a writer,” he said to me one evening. “But then I had to recognize I could not make that my career. I still love the theater. I want to be a teacher. All of that,” he said, “is still inside of me.”

  Hearing this, I did my best to steer away from any of those sweeteners that had never been a part of our relationship. I did point out to him that many of the people I admired most, the talented young research aides for instance who help me to complete my books, were typically about his age, and some of them three or four years older, and they still were looking for that moment when their goals and longings, inchoate and disparate as they appeared to be, came together all at once—and frequently in unexpected ways.

  But words are easy. And he needed more than words. It was Martha—“the reverend,” as he called her still—who understood, better than I, that he needed a specific sense of purpose now, a sense of being “centered” at this moment in his life, no matter what direction he might later go. And she was wise and practical enough to find a way by which to make this possible.

  Martha had always been a rock of loyalty to Jeremy. In the time of deep uncertainty he was going through, the church was his safe harbor. She put him to work teaching in the afterschool and, at some later point—I don’t recall exactly when—she placed him in a more demanding and responsible position as the manager of the office at St. Ann’s. In this role, he worked closely at her side.

  For now, therefore, he had a solid job, managed his position well and intervened effectively when problems would arise, not only at the church but in the community it served. Medical emergencies, warnings of eviction, a child who broke into tears because she’d seen a shooting on the street while walking to St. Ann’s, all of this infused the daily fabric of existence at the afterschool and in the neighborhood nearby. When the pastor had to be away, Jeremy would always check with her by phone but, if he couldn’t reach her, he was learning to assume and exercise good judgment of his own.

  The confidence that Martha placed in Jeremy soon extended into other areas as well. When members of the congregation could not leave their homes, because of illness for example, or if they were in a hospital and perhaps not likely to survive, Martha made repeated visits in which she would hold their hands, talk with them and pray with them, and listen to their hopes and fears. After a while, she began inviting Jeremy to come with her.

  “He has a gift for giving comfort to these people. Some of them are elderly,” she said. “Sometimes he does this on his own, going back to talk with them, or read to them, or pray with them, or simply bring whatever sense of peace and kindness that he can into their final days. It’s not perfunctory for Jeremy. It comes right from his heart and soul. I know that they look forward to his visits.”

  Beneath the surface of his cleverness with words, beneath his unabated and intensely felt attraction to the literary world and to works of theater that had mesmerized him since his years in school, something new was stirring in him now. Or, more precisely, something that had been there since he was a child, but had been quiescent in him for a good long while, seemed to come to life again.

  “You know,” he said, “I still have that feeling about teaching. It hasn’t gone away. But maybe there are other ways of teaching than the one that takes place in a school. …”

  Martha had already spoken of his pastoral abilities and had once reflected on whether he might someday be a candidate for ordination. “He has the qualities of character. His sense of theater wouldn’t hurt. He’d have to go through seminary first. …” I didn’t know if this was what was in mind when he spoke of “other ways of teaching.” But he left the matter there. And I didn’t press him to go any further.

  – III –

  On a recent evening I was with him in his office at St. Ann’s as he was wrapping up his work. It was after six o’clock. The pastor had left. The children were gone. He slipped some messages and memos for the pastor into a manila folder and put them in a drawer. In the silence of the church where we had met so many years before, he was in a mood to talk.

  “When I get discouraged”—and, he said, “it happens to me quite a lot—I tell myself to think about the distance that I’ve gone since I was a child here and you and Martha, in a sense, ‘sent me out into the world.’

  “The years at boarding school were more intimidating for me maybe than you really knew, because I felt so different from the other kids at first. It was not until I got into my theater group, and even then it took almost a year, before I felt that I was making friends with other kids, and not just my teachers. And, as I guess you probably knew, I was never positive until my senior year that I would graduate. And all of this became much harder when I saw what was ahead of me in college.

  “Theater was my personal protection. I knew that I could do it well. You know what it’s like when there’s one thing that you’re sure of? It was like my fortress. I directed three plays while I was in college, always with a social message. One of them I wrote myself. I don’t need to tell you that my grades were not the best, and you’ll remember that you wondered whether I could finish in four years. But I surprised myself: I did.

  “The disappointment that I felt when I went to grad school and I finally realized it was more than I could do—it could have crushed me. … Well, it did crush me when I had to give it up. But somehow I was able to get back on my feet, and the reverend helped to make it easier for me.

  “Now I’ve had a chance to work with children here. I was working with the little ones for most of the first two years. I’m always happy when one of them comes upstairs and asks me, ‘How you doin’, Mr. Jeremy?’ I like to think I made a difference in their lives, even though I know that it was just a small beginning. And I think I’ve come to learn how many other ways there are to make a difference for these kids, and not only for the kids but for their parents and grandparents too. I take some satisfaction in what I’ve been able to achieve.” He leaned across his desk before he spoke again. “But I do not intend to leave it there. …

  “When people tell me, ‘This idea of yours, this thing you have in mind, you will never do it. You don’t know the way to do it. You don’t have the discipline and steadiness to do it. This, for you, WILL NOT BE ALLOWED,’ I tell myself, ‘I will do it anyway. I will do it someday when I’m ready and I’m strong.’

  “Do you remember when I talked with Dr. Coles? I mean, the time he came to lecture at my school?”

  “You told me that he had sad eyes.”

  “Do you remember what I asked?”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said.

  “I asked him whether someone that he wrote about, a little girl in Mississippi—Ruby Bridges was her name—had finally reached her goal in life and if she felt fulfilled. And he said a goal should not be seen as something separate from the journey that a person takes to get there. ‘Not the place, but the path. Not the goal, but the way.’ That’s how I remember it.

  “I still believe the journey is ahead of me.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Killing Fields

  A tiny boy
.

  Seven years old.

  Light brown skin. Dark brown hair. A glowing smile in his eyes. Angelo: a mischievous boy. But the teachers at his school adored him.

  A little girl named Tabitha Brown, who was in his class at P.S. 30, told me that she sat as far away from him as possible because, she said, “he’s bad” in class and says “bad things” to her.

  “What does he say?”

  “He says, ‘Fishy, fishy!’ ”

  “That doesn’t seem so bad,” I said.

  “It’s bad! It is! He comes right up behind me when the teacher isn’t looking—and he says it!”

  “Say it again?”

  “Fishy, fishy!” she replied, gulping like a minnow at air bubbles as she said the dreaded words a second time. Then she concealed her face in her arms and leaned down on the tabletop and fell into gales of laughter, shaking her head repeatedly.

  Angelo posed a lot of minor problems for the people at St. Ann’s. He seemed to have decided that he would be “a bad little boy,” although the bad things that he did were always fairly innocent—on the scale of “fishy, fishy”—and Martha told me that he had a strong religious side and asked her many questions about God.

  Once, according to Miss Katrice, who worked in the kitchen at St. Ann’s, “he asked me if I thought that God is powerful.” She told him he should go upstairs and ask the priest. Martha, she said, told him that “the Lord makes miracles if we believe in Him with all our hearts.” Later, she said, he came back to the kitchen “and he said, ‘If God works miracles, how come He never helps me to pick up my toys?’