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

by Jonathan Kozol

  I asked him where he went when he would run away.

  “I’d go to people in New York I knew.”

  I asked him who these people were.

  “Different people. Usually I went to the family of a friend. He had been my closest friend. …” He hesitated briefly, and he sounded guarded. Then he said, “His parents were drug dealers. They still are. My friend is dead. …

  “Too many deaths,” he added.

  But Benjamin continued to place himself in danger. He soon began hanging out with a group of people, most of them teenagers or in their early twenties, who had formed a kind of club that met in the evenings in the home of an older man who, as Benjamin described him, was “sort of the club leader.” The man was old enough, he said, to be the father of most of the kids who came to his apartment. But, in a scenario reminiscent of a novel of Charles Dickens, it seems that he was something of an artist at manipulating younger people and, said Benjamin, encouraged them in acts of criminality.

  “Drugs were part of the scene,” he said. “and I got involved in that. … But mostly, it was ‘boosting.’ Stealing clothes and other stuff from expensive stores. Fashionable labels like Gucci and Armani. …”

  When Martha learned of this, she knew what she had to do. She went directly to the house and confronted “the club leader.” I don’t know how many people would have wished to walk into that house at night with no one at their side. But Martha is a fearless woman and, when it came to someone whom she loved, there was nothing that could stop her.

  “Martha brought me home with her,” he told me. “By the grace of God, she hadn’t given up on me.”

  But his troubles were not over. He continued stealing. His use of drugs continued too, and this soon intensified. He didn’t tell me until recently that he’d grown dependent upon marijuana—but, as he explained this, not just any common kind of marijuana. “It was sprayed or mixed with something else to increase its potency,” and “I found it overwhelmingly addictive. It threw me for a loop. I needed it when I woke up. I needed it right through the day. I needed it at night. I couldn’t cope without it.”

  He knew he’d started using it, he said, “to run away from my emotions.” Ever since his brother died after begging out there on the corner all those years, he said that he had been consumed with even greater guilt than he’d felt before. “Now it was only my sister and myself, and she was far gone into drugs.” He worried, with good reason, that he might be heading in the same direction.

  “I was seeing a therapist again, but it wasn’t getting through to me. Same problem as before. I had seen three therapists by then, but none of them were able to connect with me.”

  His drug dependence and his stealing finally caught up with him when he was arrested one night in Manhattan and taken to the Tombs. Martha could have paid his bail the next day so that he could be released, pending his time of trial. “But,” she said, “I thought it in his interest to delay for a few days.” Then she paid his bail—“it was a thousand dollars”—and she brought him home.

  Benjamin agreed to enter a plea bargain. As in Angelo’s case, this allowed him to remain at home while awaiting sentencing. At the sentencing, he was fortunate to be given nothing worse than a year’s probation. If he stayed away from drugs and kept out of trouble, his guilty plea would later be expunged, so that his record would be clear. Staying away from drugs, however, was not going to be easy. His need for them, by this time, was physical, he said, as well as psychological. He realized he could not get over his addiction on his own and solely by willpower.

  A moment of decision had arrived for Benjamin. Traditional psychiatry had been unsuccessful in addressing his addiction on an outpatient basis: talking for an hour with a therapist, then being free to go back to the places and the situations where the problem had begun. As tough as it would be, he knew what he had to do. “He had some inner voice,” said Martha, “that told him what he needed. It was a remarkable internal quality. And it was this quality that ultimately saved him.”

  Benjamin entered Odyssey House, a residential program for the rehabilitation of addicted people. It was a long struggle for him, hardest at the start, but he stuck it out and didn’t try to run away. And he didn’t use excuses to steer away from his responsibility. Harking back to the world of drugs by which he’d been surrounded in the first twelve years of life, or to his mother’s early death, or to the lives his older brothers and his sister led—none of this could help him now. He had to look into himself. And he did so, bravely.

  I’ve wondered often why it is that so many adolescents and young men—Vicky’s son, for instance, and Miranda’s brother, and Ariella’s oldest boy—never found it possible to search into themselves, even though all three of them had support available at the time when they were courting their self-ruin, while Benjamin was able to look piercingly into himself once he went into recovery. Martha’s love and loyalty surely had a role in this. More important, I believe, was the model of determination he had seen in her, starting in her first year as the pastor of St. Ann’s. He told me he was “at her side when that group was waving posters at her on the front steps of the church”—“NO WHITE WOMAN WANTED HERE”—and he saw the way she moved right on “to do the work that God intended her to do.” He’s told me many times that her example of persistence and relentlessness throughout the years he’d lived with her “helped me find the strength inside of me I didn’t know I had.”

  But, in the long run, Benjamin’s recovery depended on his own ability to dig out of the nightmare of his early years and see enough potential value in himself to turn his back upon the past, look hard at the present crisis he was in, and then begin to shape a set of goals that would give some meaning to the future. “He was one of very few in the group that went into the program with him,” Martha said, “who went through it all”—it was, she said, “a kind of 12-step program”—“and who completed it successfully.”

  In the final stages of the program, as Benjamin explained it, those who had progressed the farthest were expected to assume a leadership relationship to others who were finding it more difficult or were on the verge of dropping out. It was the evolution of this sense of leadership in Benjamin that led him in the years to come, and up to the present day, to take responsibility for other groups of drug-addicted people, either in recovery houses or in settings such as neighborhood centers, for example, in which he ran or supervised programs of his own.

  Working with other people in recovery, Benjamin believes, has helped to reinforce his own willpower too, because “the process of ‘recovery’ is an ongoing thing that isn’t over when you finish with a program. When I work with people who are fighting their addictions, I don’t speak about myself as ‘a recovered addict.’ I say that I’m a person in continual recovery.”

  Meanwhile, he was back in school, in individual tutorial instruction. In the role of leadership and mentorship he was assuming now, he had a stronger motive to bring up his academic skills than he’d ever felt before. His use of language was increasingly adept. His analytic gifts in sorting out “the pieces of the puzzle,” as he called it, in addicts who relied on him, as well as in himself, were more and more insightful and mature. At the church, where he was present often as an unpaid volunteer and, along with Jeremy, sometimes filled the role of surrogate for Martha when she had to be out of the office for a time, he became unusually effective in calming stormy waters when a staff dispute occurred. Developing his literacy skills, so that he could read with ease and develop a degree of mastery in his use of written words, was a natural progression for him now.

  His sister continued to lead a troubled life. Three years ago, he says, he brought her into Odyssey House. “She stayed there almost for a year until she threw a pot of scalding water at a man who said something she didn’t like. They had to throw her out. …

  “I try to numb myself emotionally in order to protec
t myself from sudden shock because I still believe it’s possible that she could kill herself or do it unintendingly by provoking someone else to kill her. I think that’s more likely. …” But, he says, “this sense of being powerless to bring my sister back is part of what is driving me. When I can help other people, it’s as if I’m doing it for her, or maybe for my brother. I know that isn’t very clear. It’s something I’m still working through, to try to understand. …

  “You know?” he says. “My sister has a heart of gold when she isn’t messing up her mind. She’s helped a lot of other people. But she cannot help herself. No matter how I try to dull myself—because I simply cannot live with so much guilt for what I don’t know how to change—I cannot abandon her. I never will.”

  – III –

  “Lord … , teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”

  The twelfth verse of the ninetieth psalm has come to be especially important to Benjamin and Martha. Benjamin has been obliged, more forcefully and frequently than most of us, to look into the face of his mortality. The sheer amount of death he’s had to witness, not only when he was a child and teenager but up into these recent times as well—the many funerals, at which he’s served with Jeremy as one of Martha’s acolytes, for people who have passed away all too early in their lives—might easily have left him with unhealthy feelings of foreboding or morbidity. Instead, it’s had the opposite effect of teaching him to value life with all the greater thankfulness because he’s come to recognize how fragile it can be.

  Meanwhile, the call to service that he feels and the sense of calm that he can bring to others, and now to himself, have given him the kind of dignity that elevates his life far above the level of obsession with his own concerns at the cost of those around him.

  “Every bit of sorrow he’s been through,” Martha said in a reflective moment when we had some quiet time together earlier this fall, “all the anguish, all the deaths he’s seen first-hand—I wish this could be said for all of us—has, I think, intensified his wish to do as much good as he can within this world in the years that God allows us. The words of the psalm, ‘to number our days,’ are not an invocation to presentiments of death but to use the days that we are given wisely.”

  Benjamin’s religious faith, which became important to him as a child when he walked into St. Ann’s and knocked on Martha’s door and, soon after that, began to stand beside her as one of her acolytes, has never left him through the years. But it deepened greatly and became essential to his sense of hope when he began the process of recovery from his addiction. “It’s a guiding force within my life today,” he says. “God had a role in sparing me. Everything I’m doing now, I like to think that this was part of His intention.”

  He moved into his own apartment seven years ago, but he says he speaks with Martha three or four times every day, “and I see her all the time when I stop by at the church, and every Sunday, when I’m there for mass. She and I went to hell and back—sorry for my language!—when she took me in. I couldn’t bring myself to call her ‘Mom’ at first because, I’d think, ‘God gives us only one Mom and I’ve buried mine.’ Now I think of Martha as my mother. I simply couldn’t say it until something in me had been healed. I think I’m even closer to her since I moved out on my own.”

  Now and then on Sunday afternoons, not as often as I’d like, they drive up to New England, to a seacoast town, and stay over a few nights. Martha’s work is too intense for her to let herself relax on more than rare occasions, but when they’re here we have a chance to go out to a restaurant and reminisce about the kids I first encountered at St. Ann’s when they were very young, and still very innocent, and sometimes very funny—Pineapple and Angelo always seem to come up in our conversation—and they bring me up to date on the newest programs at the afterschool.

  Benjamin’s cell phone rings at least a few times every evening that he’s here. “Someone who’s not feeling well,” he’ll say, or “someone who’s a little scared. …” He’ll take the phone outside to talk. When he comes in, he sometimes has a worried look. His worries (I have the same problem too) go right to his stomach and he’ll wait for a few minutes for the flurries to subside so he can enjoy his meal.

  His life is full. He has a wide circle of friends. He goes to class to complete his education in the mornings and goes to a gym to exercise and swim for his health and relaxation in the afternoons. Meanwhile, almost every evening of the week, he leads a group of people in recovery. He’s often with them until ten or twelve at night. This is his true vocation.

  What always strikes me when we talk or get together now is the sense of warm protectiveness he brings to bear, not only in the work he does but in the lives of everyone who’s close to him. When he knows I’m home alone, he’ll call me on an impulse. If I’m out, he’ll leave a message on my phone. “Hi, God Daddy! Thinking of you. Give a ring when you have time. God bless. Take good care. …”

  Benjamin’s birthday and my own come on the same day in September. We always try to talk the night before. He very seldom speaks of any problems he may have. He may tell me just a bit about some of the tribulations in his work. Mostly, he fills me in with cheerful details about somebody that he knows I care about. “Miss Katrice was in the hospital, but she’s feeling better now. … Angelo’s keeping out of trouble. He’s still got that big wide-open smile. … Jeremy’s been just terrific in the job he’s doing at the church. The afterschool, by the way, is going beautifully this year.”

  He likes to bring me good news from the Bronx.

  EPILOGUE

  Pineapple Has a Few More Things to Say

  There are people, I believe, who will look at certain children in this book—those whose lives have been most difficult, those whose lives were cut off at an early age—and will see these outcomes as the consequence of circumstances far beyond society’s control. Vicky’s son, like Pietro’s, and like Silvio, seems to have been driven to pursue his own destruction by forces in his character he could not understand. Angelo, as he would now agree, repeatedly made errors of poor judgment that compounded the external obstacles he faced. Benjamin, too, had more than a minor role in deepening the troubles that his family history had handed on to him.

  But society also had a role in darkening these children’s lives. Three of these boys underwent the miseries of places like the Martinique at ages when they were the most susceptible to the pathological conditions that surrounded them. Angelo came of age at a time when criminality was raging in Mott Haven. So, too, did Benjamin, who saw his siblings drowning in the river of narcotics that flooded Beekman Ave. Why would any city put a mother and her children in a place like that to start with?

  The word “accountability” is very much in fashion now. Children in the inner cities, we are told, must be “held accountable” for their success or failure. But none of these children can be held accountable for choosing where they had been born or where they led their childhood. Nor can they be blamed for the historic failings of their schools. Nor, of course, are any of these children responsible in any way at all for the massive unemployment, and the flight of businesses and industries, that have put so many young men on the corners of the streets with no useful purposes within their daily lives. (“Visitors,” Martha told me at the time of the recession of 2001, “are asking if the economic crisis has taken a high toll on people in our parish. I tell them that we’ve always been in a depression in Mott Haven, so it’s hard to see a difference.”)

  The question might be reasonably asked: If all of these externally determined forces of discouragement had not been present when these kids were growing up, would some of them have fallen into turbulent and painful lives in any case, or forfeited their lives before they even grew into maturity? There’s no way to know, but I suppose the answer would be yes. Unhealthy and self-destructive inclinations are not the “special illnesses” of young men and women who grow up in inner-ci
ty neighborhoods. I recall, from my father’s sixty years of practicing psychiatry, that he treated many affluent young people who seemed “hell-bent,” as he put it, “on finding any way they can to ruin their own lives,” and some of them attempted suicide repeatedly.

  But, for the children of a ghettoized community, the pre-existing context created by the social order cannot be lightly written off by cheap and facile language about “parental failings” or by the rhetoric of “personal responsibility,” which is the last resort of scoundrels in the civic and political arena who will, it seems, go to any length to exculpate America for its sins against our poorest people.

  The question of exceptionality needs to be dealt with here.

  Pineapple, as I’ve noted, lived in the Diego-Beekman housing and trudged up the street to P.S. 65. That was where she had the teacher she called “Mr. Camel,” one of the seven unprepared instructors who came and went throughout her third- and fourth-grade years. Jeremy lived in a tower of decrepitude where he was robbed at knifepoint, as we’ve seen, and sometimes had to walk the stairs to get to his apartment when the elevator, as he put it, didn’t “want to come” down to the lobby. He was fortunate to go to P.S. 30; but he was often beaten up and bullied when he was in middle school.

  Yet both these children, as well as Leonardo and Pineapple’s sisters, and Tabitha, and several of the others I was close to at St. Ann’s rose above the problems and the perils of the neighborhood, finished their schooling in a healthy state of mind, went on to college, and are now envisioning the range of opportunities their education will allow. Benjamin, meanwhile, without the benefit of college, has been able to carve out a beautiful vocation of his own.