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

by Jonathan Kozol

  “So help me, Jonathan,” she said, one hand against her breast, “I had to laugh!”

  As young as he was, Angelo seemed to do a lot of thinking about God. He didn’t doubt that God had power to affect his life, but he believed that he had power too, because he was convinced that his own behavior could determine whether God felt good or bad. God was pleased, he told me once—“He’s happy!”—when a child did what he was supposed to do. But when a child misbehaved, he told me that “God cries.”

  “How do you know God cries?” I asked.

  “I can hear God crying,” he replied.

  “You can hear him?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What do you do?”

  “I go to the priest.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Can you please give me bless?”

  “What does she do?”

  He told me that she sprinkled water on his head. He called it “whole-fly water,” but I had seen her sprinkling holy water on the children’s heads so I knew that this was what he meant. The ritual had less solemnity than I had expected. Martha does it in a playful way. But Angelo really did believe the holy water was going to help him not to misbehave.

  Angelo’s mother was an equable and good-natured woman who worked at the pharmacy on St. Ann’s Avenue in the same block as the church. His father was in prison, six hours from New York. He had been in prison almost from the time Angelo was born. Angelo used to say he was away “at school.” He told me once his father would be “graduating” soon.

  A picture of Angelo, standing in the doorway of the kitchen at St. Ann’s, shows a child with a round and friendly face, his hair cut very short, holding a stuffed rabbit under his right arm. Fred Rogers took the photograph, sometime in the fall of 1996. He was in New York to do a lecture with me and then to do an interview for PBS. When we were done, he asked if I would take him with me to St. Ann’s so he could see the afterschool and meet the children there.

  The place was packed. Angelo was at the far end of the room, but he spotted us the moment we arrived. He headed straight across the floor with his arms spread wide, looked Mr. Rogers directly in the eyes, wrapped his arms around his waist, and reached up as high as he could to kiss him on his face.

  After the pastor had welcomed Mr. Rogers to St. Ann’s and introduced him to the children and the staff, many of the children left the room to go to their tutorial instruction on the top floor of the church. But she permitted Angelo and Tabitha and about a dozen of the other little ones to remain behind to talk with Mr. Rogers, and Miss Katrice brought out a tray of cookies and tiny cups of juice.

  A few weeks later, Mr. Rogers sent me an album of pictures he had taken, with observations he had jotted down on yellow stick-on pages. “This one is my favorite,” he had written underneath the photograph of Angelo. “There was a real light in his eyes, not just a child’s normal friendliness,” he said. “I won’t forget him. …”

  When Angelo was in first grade, a year before we met, he misbehaved and didn’t do his lessons, and when springtime came his teacher said he wasn’t ready to go on to second grade. So, on a day in June, Miss Rosa had to tell his mother that he couldn’t be promoted.

  It wasn’t until September of that year, when he was in the first grade for the second time, that I got to know him at St. Ann’s, and it wasn’t until he was in the second grade that I started visiting his school.

  His teacher, an African-American woman in her fifties by the name of Frances Dukes, had taught at the school for fifteen years. She had twenty-nine children in her room, but she had a firm old-fashioned style that enabled her to keep a class of children under good control without the need to raise her voice when they misbehaved. She would simply fold her arms and give the class a disappointed look—the way their grandmas might have done—and order and respectfulness would be restored.

  “My children are grown up,” she said. “I live alone. These children are my family.”

  I could tell she had a special feeling of protectiveness for Angelo. “Even when he’s up to mischief in the room,” she said, “there’s something in his personality that makes it easy to forgive him. I’d love to take him on a holiday someday. I think it would be fun to take him to the South and show him where I lived when I was growing up.”

  Once, when I was standing with her at her desk, Angelo came up to us, put his arm around my waist, pressed his head against my side, and looked up at the teacher. “He’s been trying very hard this year,” she told me, looking down at Angelo. “But he does talk out of place in class … , and we’re working on this, aren’t we?”—to which he, of course, agreed and nodded eagerly.

  Angelo’s birthday that year came on the final day of school. Another child’s birthday would be one day later. The teacher asked them to come up and stand before the blackboard while the class sang “Happy Birthday,” after which everybody got a slice of birthday cake with yellow frosting that she’d made for them the night before.

  Angelo had a tennis racquet on his desk: a present from the principal, Miss Rosa. When he brought it up to show Miss Dukes, she asked him if he knew that she played tennis too.

  “You do?” he said.

  “I do.”

  She surprised him even more by telling him that she knew how to rollerblade. The children smiled at the thought of their teacher, who was so respectable and proper, spinning along the sidewalks of the town in which she lived, which was in New Jersey, riding on her rollerblades. …

  – II –

  The years at P.S. 30 were happy ones for Angelo. In third grade and fourth grade he was very fortunate to have other teachers who were rigorous and seasoned, like Miss Dukes, and who also treated him protectively but firmly. In fifth grade, he had Miss Harrinarine, a wonderful teacher I’ve described before.

  His “bad boy” inclinations had been softened to a large degree by the time he left the school. But they resurfaced when he entered middle school, the same chaotic and unhappy place that Jeremy had attended earlier. The starkness of the contrast between the safe and warm environment of his elementary school and the anonymity and impersonality he encountered at his middle school brought out a combative quality in Angelo. Outbreaks of violence were common at the school. The toughest boys were the ones who set the norm. They clustered in the corridors and teased and threatened students whom they knew that they could scare. Angelo said, “I wanted them to think I was as tough as they were, so they wouldn’t mess with me. …”

  He learned to be a fighter. And, even though he felt that he was fighting in his own defense, he was suspended three times in one year. At that point, his mother moved out of the neighborhood into a part of Spanish Harlem that may not have been as rough as the streets around St. Ann’s but, as he told me later, had “big problems” of its own, including a drug culture. His mother enrolled him in a school near their apartment, but his growing tendency to take extreme offense at disrespectful statements other students made at his expense, and the sudden waves of fury with which he’d defend himself, led him soon to be expelled.

  He was now assigned to yet another school, which the principal himself described to me as “a dumping ground” for kids that “other schools don’t want.” The school was one of several of those so-called “themed academies” with pretentiously imposing acronymic names that had been newly founded in New York. But it was academic only in its name. Class size averaged thirty students. (I walked into one class that held thirty-one, another that held thirty-two.) Thirteen of the fifteen teachers were not certified to teach. Supplies were scarce. “Three of my classes don’t have textbooks,” said the principal. “I have to fight and scratch for everything I get.”

  The school was only about a dozen blocks from the overwhelmingly white Upper East Side of Manhattan, but more than ninety-nine percent of students at the school were black or Hispanic. I me
t a single white girl in the hours I was there.

  I asked a mathematics teacher how he happened to be teaching there. He told me he had been in business but—presumably, he had lost his job—needed to find other work. “A friend said, ‘Bring your college transcript in,’ ” The next day, he said, he was teaching at this school.

  “If we had the money, ideal class size for these kids would be fifteen to twenty,” another teacher said. But, even if they had the money for sufficient teachers, the principal observed, “we wouldn’t have the space.” He opened a door that led into a storage closet. I went into the closet with him. There was scarcely room for us to turn around. “This,” he told me, “is our social studies office. How would you like to have your office here?”

  I had met the principal at an education conference seven months before. The topic of my lecture had been inequality in funding and resources in our urban schools. I noticed him nodding in agreement when I made a reference to New York. After my talk, he had taken me aside and told me he’d be grateful if I’d visit with his teachers and his students when I had a chance. At the time, I didn’t know that Angelo was there.

  After the principal brought me to an English class and a rudimentary mathematics class, we came to a room with social studies posters (two of them, to be exact) taped across one of the walls. The other walls were bare. Before the principal could introduce me to the teacher, Angelo stood up in the middle of the class. He came directly to the door. He was much taller than when I had seen him last, but he still had a boyish look and gave me one of those big and unembarrassed hugs he used to give when he was a child at St. Ann’s. I explained to the principal that Angelo and I had known each other since he was a boy. So he invited him to come out to the corridor to talk.

  As it happened, at the moment when we left the room, there was an uproar taking place outside the classroom door. A very tall Hispanic boy, bleeding from a wound above one of his eyes, came tearing down the corridor and shoved all three of us aside to try to catch up with another boy who, apparently, had given him that wound. The other boy, however, had already disappeared through a doorway to the stairwell at the far end of the hall and had likely left the building by this time. The one who had been injured was in a state of wild rage. A teacher in the hallway did his best to calm him down.

  The principal brought us to his office, where he had a sofa and some comfortable chairs. He put his hand on Angelo’s arm. “This is one of the students here who makes me feel it’s worth the job. He’s trying hard to do his work. He doesn’t create problems for his teachers. He tries to keep away from students who would like to cause him trouble, like the boy that you just saw, who is almost out of my control.”

  He sat down on the sofa next to Angelo. I pulled up one of the chairs in front of them. Then he turned to Angelo and asked if he would like to tell him how it happened that we knew each other. Angelo told him how we’d met when I had come to St. Ann’s Church and how I used to visit in his class when he was in the second grade. And he talked about Miss Rosa and Miss Dukes, nostalgically and warmly. He said he wished he never had to leave Miss Rosa’s school, because he’d been happy there and the years that followed had been so much harder.

  The principal listened to him carefully. When he was finished, the principal, who was an Hispanic man and told us he had grown up in New York, talked to Angelo about his own unhappy years while he was in secondary school. He told him he had been a high school drop-out and that it was several years before he found the motivation to return to school. When he got to college, he resolved to find a way to be of help to other kids who were going through the kinds of troubles he himself had known. This, he said, was why he had decided to become a teacher. Later, he explained to Angelo, he received a graduate degree that qualified him to become a principal.

  I was impressed that he was speaking of these matters right in front of Angelo. But it also came into my mind: “He knows what he’s doing.” I thought that he was doing this in order to create the basis for a sense of reciprocity between the two of them and to break down any sense of hesitation Angelo might feel to look upon him as a friend he could confide in freely as well as an older man he could rely upon with safety.

  After Angelo went back to class, the principal said he wished he had more students like him at the school. “I’m sure you can see that I identify with Angelo. I like this boy tremendously. But he isn’t out of danger. His feelings are hurt easily, and he has a temper. I think he’s warring with himself to keep that temper under wraps and not permit it to explode.”

  He also made the candid point, which he’d alluded to before, that the very scarce resources he received could not provide these students with the caliber of teaching and the close attention and support he knew that they deserved. “All I can offer here is a very meager level of instruction.” It was, he said, “a mockery of what a kid of any race or economic class is going to require to survive in this society.”

  I left the school with a mixture of reactions. The principal’s words had hardly been encouraging and had simply reinforced what I’d already seen. At the same time, for all the school’s self-evident deficiencies, Angelo had a principal who was going to watch over him and would not abandon him and would do his very best to reinforce his confidence and keep him out of trouble by helping to develop his self-discipline.

  Angelo, in any case, had been enrolled already in two other middle schools, the one that had expelled him and the one that had repeatedly suspended him. It seemed unlikely that any other middle school would be willing to accept him; and any school that did would probably be no better, and might be even worse, than the one he was attending. I hoped for the best, but I could not easily dispel a feeling of foreboding.

  – III –

  The years in middle school for too many children in the Bronx, as in other troubled sections of New York, have proven to be killing fields in academic terms, as well as psychologically and socially. Thousands of students in other cities too, even when their elementary schooling has been relatively good, come out of their middle schools and go on to high school with severe impairment of their basic skills. Whatever assets they’ve acquired in the elementary years seem to be transmuted into deficits by the time they enter the ninth grade.

  High school was a time of misery for Angelo. As hard as he tried, he could not keep up with the subject-matter content of the courses students had to take in their ninth- and tenth-grade years. In September, 2006, when he expected to begin eleventh grade—he was seventeen by now—he was told he hadn’t been promoted, because he’d failed so many courses in the year before.

  Humiliation, injured pride, placed him in a state of mind in which he found it difficult to focus on his lessons and pay attention to his teachers in the classes he was taking for a second time. Like many other students who are held back from promotion twice or more before they are eighteen, Angelo had lost the motivation to keep on. Early in October, he dropped out of school.

  I had not seen Angelo for two years at the time—it would be another two years before I caught up with him again. This was in part because my mother, then my father, passed away during those years and there was a period when I didn’t travel to New York at all. When I did begin to go back to the Bronx, I found myself preoccupied with students, or with former students, who were still in the South Bronx and still associated somehow with St. Ann’s.

  I knew that Angelo was still in Harlem, but I never knew exactly where he lived or if he had a phone. As has often been the case, I kept in closest contact with those of the students who were easiest to reach or who called me on their own to tell me when their phone numbers were changed. When I inquired about Angelo, nobody around St. Ann’s seemed to know what he was doing now. Ariella said she’d seen him once or twice in the streets around the church but that he was with his friends and didn’t stop to talk with her.

  The next time I saw him was in 2009, by which
time his mother had moved back to the Bronx. We met on St. Ann’s Avenue as I was coming up the block from the corner store. He made it obvious that he was glad to see me—as always, a hug, right in front of everybody passing in the street—but he also looked concerned. We went up to the garden on the hill behind the church. It was early evening. We sat down on the grass.

  He told me right away he’d been in trouble with the law and had been arrested something like a dozen times since he had left middle school. In seven of these cases, he was taken to the Tombs, a complex of detention centers in Manhattan where detainees can be held while their case is being processed and while waiting for arraignment. In theory, they must be arraigned or else released within one day but, because of court delays, this sometimes can take longer.

  When I asked him what he’d done to end up in the Tombs, the reasons that he gave me seemed of such a minor nature that I had to wonder if he was leaving something out. Once, for example, he was on the subway platform waiting for a train when a group of young, unruly men about his age created a disorder that led to their arrest. The transit police apparently believed he was part of the same group and asked to see his ID card, but he said, “I didn’t have it with me.” So they arrested him as well. He was released to his mother, with no charges, early the next morning.

  Another time, he had used his Metro card to go through the turnstile—legally, correctly—but after he went through, a man behind him who, he said, looked very poor (“I thought that he was homeless”) asked him, as a favor, if he would swipe him through. Only a week before, Martha had done the same for me, since I had no Metro card, when we were going through the turnstile at Brook Avenue. Martha, of course, wears the collar of a clergywoman, and she’s a white person, and I was dressed in my suit and tie from Harvard Square.

  Not so with Angelo. A transit officer apparently was watching him and, he said, “beckoned to me with his finger,” and informed him that it was illegal to do what he had done. “He checked my record and he saw my previous arrest. I also jumped a turnstile once when I was younger, and that was in my record too.” So that was the second time he was taken to the Tombs.