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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Yet another time, he’d been standing on a corner, somewhere in East Harlem, close to a street where a robbery had taken place a short time before. A police car, he said, swerved up on the curb. The officer said he “fitted the description”—“light-skinned Hispanic male, white T-shirt, close-cropped hair”—of the person believed to be the perpetrator of the crime, even though the same description would have fit at least a dozen other men or teenage boys who were in the neighborhood at exactly the same time.

  Again, however, a visit to the Tombs. …

  When I said that Angelo told me he had been “in trouble with the law,” I did not intend by this to indicate that he had committed crimes, or crimes of any magnitude, like the crimes, for instance, that Christopher committed and for which he’d been convicted to a term of seven years. But the simple fact that Angelo was standing on that corner for no apparent reason, or no reason that he could explain, and probably the more important fact that he was often hanging out with boys who were committing crimes, exposed him to suspicions on the part of the police that were easily predictable.

  In at least one situation that led to his arrest, his role was not as innocent and passive as in the other cases, but involved an element of participation on his part that, as he conceded to me later, was “my own stupidity.”

  “I was on 110th Street, near the gate to Central Park,” he told me, when a wild fight broke out among the boys that he was with. One of the boys, a friend of his, was being beaten by another boy who, he said, had thrown him to the ground and then “was kicking him” and “stomping him” with heavy cleated boots. Angelo jumped into the fight and struck the bully who was beating up his friend with a knuckle-punch that nearly knocked him out.

  The entire group ended up in court. Two of the boys, who, he said, had weapons on them when they were arrested, got seven months in jail. Angelo, the youngest of the group, was ordered to return to court for a separate hearing. When he returned, he was released without being charged, but was lectured by the judge, as he knew that he deserved to be, for letting himself be drawn into the fight.

  Throughout the years since he’d dropped out of school, Angelo told me, he’d been looking for a stable job. None of the jobs he found, however, lasted very long. One was with a construction firm for which, he told me, he was “doing stock,” but it was a seasonal job and ended in four months. Another job, one he said that he enjoyed, was for a man who was renovating brownstones in a part of Harlem in which gentrification by white families had begun. But this, too, was a temporary job and, like the other, “off the books,” and it ended shortly.

  Every so often when we met, which we did more often now, Angelo would tell me he was “going back to school” and, every time he told me this, he would sound entirely earnest and sincere. But there was a terrible naïveté, as I would repeatedly discover, in what he had in mind when he spoke of “school” and what he believed the schooling he was thinking of was going to deliver.

  He was easily attracted by profit-making firms that offered a degree or some other document, which, as prospective applicants were told, was going to prepare them for occupational employment. One of these firms, called “TCI”—which stands for Technical Career Institute—advertised “associate” degrees or “associate occupational degrees,” for which it charged $6,000 for each of four semesters. What Angelo had no way to know was that the attrition rate at TCI was a catastrophic 81 percent. Fewer than one in five of those who had enrolled in TCI learned enough, or stayed with the program long enough, to receive degrees in what the catalog issued by the institute described, in an obscure location, as “150 percent of … normal time. …” How many of that 81 percent who did not receive two-year degrees by the end of three years may have done so after four or five or more years was not stated in the catalog, which leads one to suspect it was very few.

  Angelo knew none of this. I didn’t, either, until somewhat later. All I knew was that he talked about it constantly, and with the highest hopes, over the course of several months. Suddenly, he never spoke of it again.

  Another time, he was attracted to “a school,” as he mistakenly described it, which, he said, would prepare him for a job (guarding municipal buildings, I believe), give him a certificate, and arrange for his employment. He saw the advertisement in the New York Daily News.

  When he told me of his interest, I asked my assistant to see if she could locate any information about this institution. The only source of information she could find, after an extensive search, was a consumer website in which former clients of the firm, some of whom were from the Bronx or Brooklyn, issued warnings to potential applicants.

  “Beware,” said one. “They prey on your desperation,” said another. “The training is a joke. … You get a fake certificate and they send you on your way. …” “I tried to get my money back,” but the company “refused.” “It needs to be shut down.”

  What comes across from all of this, as I look at notes I made on the intermittent conversations we were having in New York, is the high exhilaration that would lead him every time to think that any of these programs would represent a magic key to open up whatever door appeared to stand in front of him. At one point—he was not yet twenty-one—he told me that he’d signed up for a program to obtain a GED. But, as he belatedly discovered, and as my assistant was able to confirm, the instructors in the program were not licensed teachers, had no experience or background in remedial instruction, and had not been given the pedagogic training they would need to give a student who had little more than elementary-level skills the preparation it would take to get through the exams.

  One of the questions that obviously comes to mind is why he kept on wasting time looking into programs that never led him anywhere, instead of turning for advice to someone well informed who was right there on the scene and who would have guided him—Martha could have done this—to any of a number of good nonprofit agencies that could offer realistic preparation for the world of work or for the GED that he was hoping to achieve.

  Once, when he was seven years old, another child at St. Ann’s, an older girl named Stephanie who sometimes helped the younger ones, asked Angelo, “What grade are you in?”

  “I had to repeat,” he said.

  “What grade did you repeat?”

  “First grade,” he replied, looking up at Stephanie. “How do you pass first grade?”

  “It’s hard,” she answered, trying to be kind to him.

  “Yes. It is. It’s hard,” he said. “All that work! And now I have to do it all again. …”

  Thirteen years had passed since then. But, as grown-up as he was and as tough as he believed that he could be, it seemed as if the puzzled seven-year-old boy in him remained. How do you do it? How do other people do it? Why are these things so difficult for me when other people seem to find them easy?

  Sometimes, when he told me of his feelings of perplexity about a goal he thought he was about to reach but which once again had slipped away from him, I found that I was thinking of a child’s toy, a little boat without an anchor, spinning in a circle as the currents drew it off in one direction and then pulled it in another. Unfortunately, one of the strongest of those currents was his unwise and persistent loyalty to a circle of acquaintances whose unhealthy patterns of existence, as he should have known by now, were not good for him. His inability to rid himself of these acquaintances was now about to lead him into making an unfortunate mistake.

  – IV –

  In the summer of 2010, Angelo was standing with a friend outside of a corner store in Harlem—he called it “a loosie store”—where people could buy cigarettes for fifty cents apiece and where, he said, the owner of the store was working with drug dealers for a portion of the profits—and, possibly also, for his own protection.

  Angelo’s friend was dealing drugs, which Angelo insisted unconvincingly that he did not know before that time. L
ike many other dealers in the Bronx and Harlem, Angelo’s friend did not keep the drugs that he was selling in his own possession. Instead, he left them stashed inside the store.

  “A Puerto Rican guy,” said Angelo, “comes up to my friend and asks him for manteca, which is a term, in Puerto Rican slang, meaning dope or heroin. Angelo’s friend—whom he calls “this idiot”—“isn’t thinking fast. He wants to make the sale. He tells him, ‘Go inside that store.’ ”

  His friend, he said, waited outside for a moment, then asked Angelo, “Come on with me into the store,” as if this were a casual matter, which it obviously was not. This is the point where Angelo, as he was about to learn, made the worst misjudgment of his life.

  “I followed him into the store. …”

  His friend, as it happened, was under surveillance by narcotics officers. The man who asked him for manteca was an undercover agent. “He slapped the cuffs on both of us.” Angelo was brought to court and charged with sale of heroin. He was sent to Rikers Island while awaiting trial.

  His attorney—he was fortunate to have a good one—cautioned him that if, as Angelo intended, he insisted he was innocent, it could be as long as twelve months, even more, before the prosecution was prepared to bring the case to trial. During that time, unless he had the large amount of money it would take him to make bail, Angelo would remain in prison. If he was found guilty when he finally went to trial, it was possible, because of his prior record of arrests, that he might face a sentence of as long as four to seven years.

  The attorney convinced him to agree to a plea bargain, one in which he pleaded guilty, but to a lesser charge than the sale of heroin, and with the understanding that the prosecution would reduce the sentence it would seek for him. The prosecution, it appears, accepted his plea bargain. As a result, he was released from Rikers Island on the day before Thanksgiving with the date of sentencing set for eight weeks later. On January 20, he was sentenced to six months in prison and five years of probation.

  The court gave him credit for the four months he’d already spent at Rikers Island and an extra two months because of “good behavior,” so, as it turned out, the sentence he was given had already been served. He would, however, be obliged to meet with his probation officer on an intensive basis. This, I knew—at least I hoped—would make him far more wary about going out at night with people who were using drugs or selling them or, for that matter, who were simply living, as he had done for several years, along the outer edge of criminality.

  There was an unexpected benefit in the months that Angelo had spent at Rikers Island. The prison runs a number of education programs, some of which I’ve been able to observe. Excellent instructors from the New York City public schools deliver Adult Basic Education to the lowest-level learners—those who never learned to read and write when they were in school. For inmates at a more proficient level, the prison also runs a program for the GED. Angelo seized upon the opportunity and took advantage of the preparation he was able to receive in classes that were half the size of those he’d had in middle school and high school.

  In the months that followed his release, he finally passed the GED in social sciences and high-school-level English language skills. He’s studying now to pass the GED in math and science also.

  Angelo is a very different person now from the injudicious boy who went into that corner store and, in so doing, walked into the arms of the police. One of the major reasons is a happy alteration in the make-up of his family and, as a direct result, the nature of his life at home.

  Angelo’s mother decided to remarry about seven years ago and, soon after, she gave birth to twins—a boy named Timothy, a girl named Violeta. When they were born, Angelo was still caught up in the behavior that led him into problems with the law. It was only after he came home from Rikers Island—the twins were nearly six by then—that he began to stabilize his state of mind enough to take a healthy and constructive role within the children’s lives.

  Their father is an older person, now in his late sixties. He has a heart condition that has recently required surgery. For these reasons, and perhaps for others of which I’m unaware, he has not become an active presence as a parent in their home. Angelo has, in effect, become the father of his younger siblings.

  He wakes them up. He gives them their breakfast. He walks them to their school. He comes back to wait for them at the end of school. If his mother’s working late, he cooks their supper. He puts them into their pajamas. He sits beside them while they do their homework, and he helps them with their homework, before he lets them watch TV—but “only for an hour.” Then he puts them into bed and reads to them before they fall asleep.

  One night this year when I was there, Violeta said she had a dream the night before. It was about Angelo. “He was in my room at school, and he and I were exactly the same size, and there was a dog with brown hair and white spots in between our chairs. The teacher said, ‘If the dog knows how to talk, he can stay. If it’s not a talking dog, he will have to leave.’ ”

  Angelo scooped her up and held her in his arms and swung her in a circle all around the room.

  Timothy told me that he had two teachers at his school. One of them, he said, was named “Miss Chicken Pea”—Angelo said the name was “Chicopee.” The other was “Miss Song.” He and Angelo took me in to see the bunk beds where he and Violeta slept. He climbed up to the bed on top, then swung around gymnastically and landed on the bed below. “You can call me Spider-Man,” he said. Angelo tickled him on the bottoms of his feet. Violeta came into the room. She wanted to be tickled, too.

  Angelo works in the hours while the children are at school—a part-time job, “a restaurant job, around the corner from my home”—but he says he misses them until he picks them up at four. The sweetness of the evenings that he spends with them at home functions as a counterforce to whatever anger other young men in his situation often feel—at themselves or at the world—after they have undergone so many troubles for so many years. And he’s not embittered by the insufficiencies of education he encountered after he had left behind the good years he had spent in elementary school, although it’s possible he has a right to be.

  – V –

  In September, Angelo and I were having dinner in the Bronx at a place called Camaguey, a small Honduran restaurant—four tables on one side, a counter and six barstools on the other. While we were eating, Angelo stood up from his chair and stared very hard at an attractive woman who was wearing denim shorts and sitting at the counter having a cold beer.

  My first reaction was that he was hoping he might capture her attention. But, after he sat down, he leaned across the table and asked if I remembered who she was.

  I told him that I had a distant memory that she was somebody I might have known before. It was the soft configuration of her jaw and the deep expressiveness within her dark brown eyes that made me think I might have met her once. But I wasn’t sure.

  “Remember when you used to visit in my second grade? There was a student in my class that I liked to tease and Miss Dukes had to scold me? And she seated her as far from me as possible?”

  I remembered that he used to tease a bashful little girl, but I told him I could not recall her name.

  “Tabitha Brown,” Angelo replied.

  At the mention of her name, the woman turned halfway around, hesitated for a moment as if she wasn’t certain whether it was Angelo, then got up, came over to our table with the cold beer in her hand, said hello to Angelo in a warm and friendly way, and took a chair from another table and sat down.

  Angelo told her that I used to visit them in the second grade. She did not remember this, but she was polite and poised and held out her hand to me and spoke to me respectfully. She smiled when I said how much I liked Miss Dukes.

  “I loved Miss Dukes,” said Tabitha. “This one”—she gave a nod at Angelo—“gave her a hard time.”


  Angelo said not a word.

  “He was a wicked little boy,” she said. “He teased me without mercy.”

  I asked if she remembered other teachers at the school and, not to my surprise, she spoke of Miss Harrinarine. She said she was “forever grateful to that woman” because “she was the first teacher that I ever had who made me realize I could go to college. She kind of held me by the hand, and, later on, when I was in high school, I would ask for her advice. If I called her after school she’d always call me back. …”

  Tabitha said she knew that she was fortunate because her parents did not let her go to middle school or high school here in the South Bronx. After P.S. 30, she had gone to school in a suburban district where her aunt and uncle lived. From high school, she had gone directly into college, but was taking off a year to work and save up money for her senior year.

  She struck me as a confident and serious young woman, not at all the bashful child I remembered from so many years before, and, when she joked with Angelo about his schoolboy days, she did it in an amiable but very grown-up way, as if she felt much older than he was. When she left to head out to the street, Angelo watched her with, I thought, a hint of something like intimidation in his eyes.

  The following day, he told me he was thinking about Tabitha. She had done “so much,” he said, and had gone so far beyond the point where both of them had started out. She had gone to college—not some kind of “institute” that advertised for customers in the Daily News—and she made it very clear that she planned to graduate. He did not sound envious of Tabitha, but he seemed to be subdued.

  I reminded him that Tabitha had some big advantages that neither he nor many other children in the neighborhood had had. In view of all the disappointments and the years of misdirection he had undergone, I told him that his own achievements were impressive too. I said I thought he should be proud of the calm and steady life he was leading now. I hope that he believed me.