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

by Jonathan Kozol

  When friends of mine who take an empathetic interest in the lives of children of the very poor try to picture what “success” might represent for kids who grow up in those sections of our cities where poverty and racial isolation are the norm, they tend to gravitate to the iconic narratives of children such as Pineapple and Jeremy, and others such as Tabitha, whose victories seem indisputable because they are recognizable in familiar academic terms. “They struggle hard. They get into college. They graduate from college. They contribute to society.” And, in Jeremy’s case, and Pineapple’s, and that of her sisters, all of this is obviously true. I still feel a sense of wonderment at what those three young women have accomplished up to this point in their lives.

  But “success,” an arbitrary term at best, takes a wide variety of forms, some of which do not glow so visibly. Angelo did not have the opportunities that Jeremy and Pineapple received. He never had the conversational exposure—to history, to books, to questions about ethics, and to challenging ideas—that Jeremy was given by the pastor and the poet and his other mentors. Nor did he have the very strong parental backing that Pineapple knew she could depend upon. His father, it will be recalled, had been in prison from the time when Angelo was born. His mother, kindly woman that she is, did not have the temperament or determination to oversee his education and could not help him to control the furious defensiveness that erupted in him in his adolescent years.

  But seven sessions in the Tombs and four months at Rikers Island have not destroyed the qualities of decency and earnestness, and persistent innocence—that “real light in his eyes” that Mr. Rogers noted when he took the photograph of Angelo that now hangs here on my wall. He isn’t slick. He isn’t glib. He isn’t cruel. He isn’t mean. He’s a kind and loving human being, which is not the case with many of the more sophisticated people that I know who have been to college or have multiple degrees. To me, those qualities of elemental goodness in his soul matter more than anything.

  CHAPTER 13

  Number Our Days

  This is about my godson. I saved his story for the last, because it was the hardest one to write.

  Benjamin lived on Beekman Ave in one of the Diego-Beekman buildings owned by Gerald Schuster, the slumlord and political contributor. The Wild Cowboys ruled the street when Benjamin was growing up. “Crack and heroin,” he recalls, “were everywhere.”

  Benjamin’s mother died when he was twelve, in 1992. She had five children. Only two are still alive.

  His oldest brother was shot dead when Benjamin was eight. He had been a drug dealer in Brooklyn.

  A second brother, Edward, whom I knew to a degree because he begged for money in front of a coffee shop and pizza place where I used to go with Jeremy, was a ghostly figure, wasted by addiction and frequently arrested. He choked to death on his own internal fluids while in the custody of the police.

  A third brother disappeared after his mother passed away and, having never reappeared, is “presumed dead,” in the language of the law.

  Benjamin has a sister who is his elder by twelve years. Addicted to crack at seventeen, she has been convicted countless times for sale of drugs, use of drugs, robbery, and gun possession. She has spent more of her life in prison than she has on the outside.

  Benjamin was raped at the age of nine. It happened in his own home on his mother’s bed. He was raped by Edward, the drug-addicted brother whom I used to see on the corner outside of the coffee shop.

  When he was ten, he began to steal as a way to bring home money to his mother. She was very sick by then with the cancer that would kill her two years later.

  With his mother’s passing, and no father in his life (he scarcely knew his father, who was an alcoholic), there was no one in his family left alive or capable of offering protection other than his sister when she was not in prison, and what she could offer by way of protection was not without entanglements that endangered him still more. Benjamin was on his own or, at least, he would have been had it not been for the fact that Martha had already come to know him by that time.

  Martha was not yet the pastor of St. Ann’s when his mother became ill, but she was familiar with people in the neighborhood because of the years in which she was a lawyer and had done pro bono work in the community. Later, when she began her preparation for the priesthood, she did her fieldwork at the church as a seminarian. Once she was ordained, she returned there in the role of an assistant priest. It was in that year, prior to the time in 1993 when she was appointed to be pastor, that she and Benjamin had become acquainted with each other.

  “One day,” she said, “Benjamin came into the church and asked me for a job. He was all of eleven years old. I didn’t really have a job that I could give him, but I liked him right away and could see he wanted someone he could talk to. After that, he began to come here every Sunday. Then he asked if he could be an acolyte, and the first Sunday when he stood there at the altar was the day I met his mother. She was in enormous pain, but she got up out of bed and came here to the church, because she wouldn’t miss that day for anything.

  “At that time,” Martha said, “Benjamin’s mother was living in the kind of destitution that most people who don’t live in neighborhoods like this one could not easily imagine. In the four years prior to the time we met, she never had the money to cook Thanksgiving dinner for him in their home. They had to line up at soup kitchens and hope to get their dinner by the grace of charity.” There were days, she said, when they had no food at all—apart from what Katrice and Martha packaged up and sent home with Benjamin.

  “He’d often come to church on Sunday mornings in the winter without a pair of socks, so we’d have to look into the boxes of donated clothes to find a pair of socks to keep him warm.” Sometimes he would come “in clothes that were still damp, because he’d put them in the washer but didn’t have the money to put them through the dryer. …

  “After I met his mother at the church, I began to visit her at home. When she went into the hospital, I would go with Benjamin every day to be with her.

  “In the last weeks of her life, she asked me several times if I would take him in and be a mother to him after she was gone. But I hesitated. He was a boy, twelve years old, and he was maturing quickly. My apartment’s small. I didn’t know if I could do it. I could not decide.

  “Then, as she was dying, Benjamin’s father showed up at the hospital. He said he wanted custody so that he could get the right to live in the apartment, even through he’d never been there at the times when he was needed and had never shown a bit of love for Benjamin. He appeared to be inebriated. ‘I’m not stupid. I want that apartment.’ That’s when I made up my mind.”

  Before Benjamin’s mother died, Martha promised her that she would take custody of Benjamin. In the fulfillment of that promise, Benjamin’s life and that of the soon-to-be-selected priest of St. Ann’s Church would be transformed forever.

  Martha’s apartment in Manhattan was not in an expensive building, but it was a safe one and was in a neighborhood where Benjamin could go outside without the risk of danger and without exposure to the street life of Mott Haven that had led his two surviving siblings (his brother Edward did not die for several years) into lifetimes of addiction. But bringing a boy approaching adolescence to share so small a space with her was not an easy matter.

  It may have been a trifle easier for Martha, because of her patient and adaptive personality, than it was for Benjamin. He’d never lived in any place like that before, where residents, although modest in their means by the standards of the East Side of Manhattan, and certainly not among the highly affluent, might have seemed as if they were to a boy who’d lived for his entire life in the Diego-Beekmans.

  Simply adapting to the habits of another person—a priest, moreover, and a woman he revered—was, he said when we talked about this later, “a really big personal thing that I had to figure out and learn how to live with.” The
n, too, “there were times when I had this fear that it all could end somehow. It was too good to be true. Why me? Not my sister? Not my brother, still there in the street? He was so far outside of the world he barely seemed to know I was his brother when I saw him on the corner. He was out there from the time my mother died until he died in 1998. I was safe in Martha’s home, but there was no way for me to pull him into safety.

  “When he died, Martha heard before me. Some people in the neighborhood who would bring him in sometimes for a shower or a meal told Martha he had died in jail. The medical examiner said that he had had a kidney failure. That was what had caused the fluid back-up that had choked him. Martha and Miss Katrice took me to the morgue. I didn’t have to see the body. I was shown a photo to identify.

  “The sun came out while I was looking at the photo. The light from the sun passed across his face. I remember hoping that he was in peace, but I also felt relief that I wouldn’t have to see him on that corner anymore.”

  Meanwhile, his sister was calling him from prison, “asking me to send her things. She’d call me four times, five times, in a day. She’d already been in prison seven years when my mother died. They brought her to the wake in handcuffs. They would not allow her to attend the funeral. …

  “When she was out, it was worse. She wanted to have money in her pocket. She always wanted to buy clothes. ‘Fly’ clothes—you know what that means? So this would lead her back to stealing and, sometimes, drug-dealing. And I was grateful to her in one way, because she did try to protect me from my brother when he had molested me, and from other threats as well. Every time she called me now, I would get down on my knees and pray. I was afraid she’d kill herself, which she used to threaten she would do if I didn’t give her something that she asked for.”

  When Martha saw the guilt that he was feeling she found a therapist for Benjamin, but he told me that he “didn’t find it easy to connect with him” because he was, in Benjamin’s words, “a downtown psychiatrist who couldn’t put himself into my situation.” And he started stealing things again, including a few precious things that belonged to Martha, in order to get money for his sister.

  But he told me that he stole for other reasons, too, not all of which were wholly altruistic. He told me this, I think, because he did not want to make excuses for himself that would oversimplify a pattern of behavior that had started, as we’ve seen, when he tried to help his mother but, in the years that followed, took on a momentum of its own.

  “I also think,” he said, “that, at one level, I was testing Martha, trying to see how far I could go before she would give up on me and send me back. It was like I wanted to provoke her. I still did not believe that I deserved what she had done for me.”

  But, in that one respect at least, he did not know Martha yet. She had more sticking power, more tenacity and loyalty, than all his provocations would be able to break down. Besides, she loved him deeply by this time, as deeply as she would have loved a child of her own—“even more,” she told me, “if that’s possible.” And there was that promise to his mother.

  – II –

  Benjamin’s life, since his mother passed away, was so closely linked to Martha’s that it seems important here to say a little more than I’ve said before about the obligations she was undertaking at St. Ann’s while also doing everything she could to relieve the anguish Benjamin was going through and to keep him out of danger.

  Before Martha had become the pastor of St. Ann’s, the church was in a state of instability—poor financial management, questionable use of funds, an afterschool that was in its doldrums, poorly run, amateurish in its offerings, and meagerly attended.

  The priest who was the temporary pastor at the time was a person of Hispanic origin who seemed to use ethnicity in a divisive manner that left black people—who were roughly half the congregation—with the feeling that they were not wholly welcome at St. Ann’s. He was a passionate man in the defense of his identity and culture but may have lacked the will, or else the capability, to reach out to people whose ethnicity was different from his own, even though they all were living in the same community. The diocese was desperate to find someone to heal the wounds and keep the church from being shut down altogether.

  When Martha was appointed, her predecessor organized a campaign of resistance, based upon his confidence that he was entitled to be the pastor of St. Ann’s and that the failure of the diocese to keep him in that role was unrelated to the question of his own effectiveness. He was supported by a small but highly vocal group of people whose hostility to Martha, as it was conveyed in signs and posters they were waving in her face, had no apparent basis other than the fact that she was a woman who happened to be white and, for this reason, ought to be rejected by a parish in the heart of the South Bronx.

  People in the neighborhood came to her defense and rapidly accepted her, not in a pro forma way but with affection and tremendous confidence. Many knew her well by then because of the work she had been doing there since she was a lawyer and a seminarian. They’d seen the warm attachment she’d developed to families that were going through the throes of illness or were simply trying to survive amidst the many crises and periods of instability that accompanied their poverty. Once she was appointed to be pastor of St. Ann’s, they were thankful and relieved when she made it clear that her first priority would be the education of their children.

  But the turmoil she had undergone at the time of her appointment—the hostility of those who were offended by her race and, perhaps, even more so by her gender—was one of the added burdens that she had to bear at the time when Benjamin came into her home and as she was setting out, with all the strength she had, to address the many urgent problems he was facing now.

  Benjamin had gone to P.S. 65, two blocks from his mother’s home. Between the well-known problems of that school and the sense of constant crisis he’d been going through at home, he graduated P.S. 65—the school “just pushed me through,” he said—not knowing how to read. At the time his mother died, he was starting middle school at the place that called itself a “school for medical careers.”

  “Martha made me go to school, but I hated it,” he said. Like many other kids who were channeled, to that school, Benjamin learned almost nothing there. But, unlike those who, at least, could read and write by the time they left fifth grade, Benjamin had nothing to sustain him, nothing to hold on to from his elementary years. The “killing” years had nothing to kill off in him. He was illiterate when he started middle school and illiterate when he left there two years later.

  Martha pulled him out of school in the South Bronx and enrolled him in a school in Harlem, called The Children’s Storefront, an innovative school with a good reputation, run by a poet with whom I was acquainted by the name of Ned O’Gorman. The school had been successful with other children who had grown up in poor neighborhoods, especially with those who had started there in preschool or in the early grades of elementary school. But Benjamin was an adolescent now and the gulf between his literacy level and that of the other students of his age presented an intimidating challenge for himself and for his teachers.

  He stayed at the Storefront a year and a half but made no academic gains that Martha could perceive. After that, she put him into an expensive private school on the West Side of Manhattan, which specialized in serving kids who were disabled academically. He remained there “a year or two,” as he remembers this, but his learning gap was now so great that it confounded every effort that his teachers made to bring him up to competence beyond a third-grade level.

  “P.S. 65 had been my ruin—then those years at middle school,” he said. “I was scared that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t think that I could ever learn. I did try. Martha helped me every night. But I’d freeze up when I went to class. And, even when I thought that I was learning, it’s like it slipped away from me. It didn’t stay. And I was always back where I bega
n.”

  He reminded me that he had started stealing when his mother became ill, and that he continued stealing and had stolen things from Martha, even though he was getting an allowance from her and had no need to steal. This remained a problem at the school he was attending. He was also slipping back to his old neighborhood at night to be with friends, some of whom were using drugs and some of whom were selling them. Sooner or later, he’d return to Martha’s home. He knew that he was safe there but he also knew he was tormenting her when he came home much later than he’d promised her.

  Finally, Martha came to the decision that the only way to break the pattern he had fallen into was to send him to a boarding school—not the kind that Jeremy and Pineapple attended, but a school that placed at least as great an emphasis on discipline as it did on academics. There’s little point in speaking of this school, because he didn’t last there long. He was expelled for stealing.

  Martha quickly found another school, this one in the Berkshires, in the western part of Massachusetts close to the border of New York, that had a reputation for coping well with students who behaved defiantly or self-destructively. A therapeutic system of behavioral conditioning was at the center of the ethos of the school. Although he stayed for two years and was not expelled this time, he told me he learned very little there and that the Skinnerian agenda had no enduring consequence in changing his behavior.

  “I’d run away,” he said. “Then I’d go back. I’d be penalized by being taken down a level”—levels of advancement or demotion were part of the incentive system at the school—“and then I’d run away again.”