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

by Jonathan Kozol

The point I need to emphasize again is that all these children had unusual advantages. Someone intervened in every case, and with dramatic consequences. In Lara’s situation, it was a devoted teacher in a failing middle school and, again, a teacher at an otherwise unsuccessful high school in New York who “spotted” her as a gifted student and gave her individual tutorial instruction that enabled her to have her choice of colleges. In Pineapple’s case, and Jeremy’s and Leonardo’s, it was either Martha or someone from outside the Bronx, or a group of people from outside New York City altogether, who shepherded these children into avenues of exit from the damage they’d already undergone, or would likely undergo, in the schools of the South Bronx. Other children from the Bronx and similar communities have been given access to good education through programs like A Better Chance, which serves children nationwide, or Prep-for-Prep, an institution in New York that looks for highly motivated students in minority communities and helps them gain admission to some of the most exclusive prep schools in the city.

  All of this, however, depends upon the charitable inclinations of a school or philanthropic donors, and charity has never been a substitute, not in any amplitude, for systematic justice and systematic equity in public education. If any lesson may be learned from the academic breakthroughs achieved by Pineapple and Jeremy, it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity but that the public schools themselves in neighborhoods of widespread destitution ought to have the rich resources, small classes, and well-prepared and well-rewarded teachers that would enable us to give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of a careful selectivity or by catching the attention of empathetic people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up whom they meet by chance. Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy.

  – II –

  Much has changed in the St. Ann’s neighborhood and other sections of Mott Haven since the days when Benjamin and Jeremy and Pineapple were young. But much remains the same.

  The changes are self-evident in physical respects. Many of the vacant lots in between the large apartment buildings have been filled in by attractive single-family and two-family houses, constructed since the last years of the 1990s, with small front lawns or gardens and a place to park a car, most of them protected by wrought-iron fences. An entire row of these wooden houses has been erected on St. Mary’s Street, opposite St. Mary’s Park, close to the end of Beekman Ave. Initially intended for families living in the neighborhood already (or so those families had been told), these houses at the present time sell for upwards of $200,000 and are owned or occupied by individuals or families whose incomes are at least three times the average family income in Mott Haven.

  What these houses represent, Martha Overall believes, is a modest early stage in a gentrification process that may be seen as well in a narrow stretch of streets ten or twelve blocks to the south and west of St. Ann’s Church, close to a bridge that leads into Manhattan. In this area, warehouse structures or buildings that were occupied in decades past by manufacturers and industries have become the studios and living space of artists and photographers. There are also a number of new-looking buildings on these streets, with signs that advertise “lofts for rent,” and, nearby, a handful of antique shops and a couple restaurants that have the look of bistros. When Martha and I spent some time walking through the neighborhood earlier this fall, the owner of one restaurant told us that he doesn’t do much business yet but sees the money that he’s spent as an “investment in the future.”

  On other streets, also in the sections of Mott Haven closest to Manhattan, a number of brownstones that might have housed low-income families in the past have been renovated to attract a clientele the New York Times describes as “adventurous and relatively prosperous.” According to one of the newer residents cited by the Times, Mott Haven brings to mind a formerly black neighborhood in Brooklyn that has since become “this really expensive place to live. … It has that feeling of something about to happen to it.”

  Those words may be taken in several different ways. If Mott Haven were someday to become a “really expensive place to live,” none of the families that I know would be able to remain there. And their continued presence in the neighborhood might, indeed, be seen as an impediment to the growth in value of the new or renovated housing, which those who purchase them are counting on.

  Optimists may be willing to believe in the promise, perennially made to inner-city residents by promoters of development, that a community of racially mixed and economically diverse mixed-income housing will evolve, in which the benefits in public education and other public services that generally accrue to neighborhoods in which substantial numbers of the affluent or middle class reside will go to poor people as well. I would like very much to believe that this could happen, although it hasn’t often been the case in any other city that I know.

  In most cities, “development” unfortunately has also meant “displacement.” I have in mind, for instance, the old South End of Boston, where I lived for many years among my students’ families. Once realtors and investors discovered its “potential,” because of its good location (close to Copley Square) and the brick and brownstone buildings that could be purchased cheaply at the time, the predominantly black and Hispanic population was shunted off into other and more isolated sections of the city. Within a decade, houses that were purchased for $50,000 were selling for $500,000. (Many today sell for upwards of $2 million.)

  I doubt that anyone, including the developers, believes that this will happen in Mott Haven, if it ever happens, for many years to come. In the aftermath of a deep recession, and with the presence of vast public housing towers, in which the city has its own investment, any imminent displacement of large numbers of poor people from Mott Haven seems to be improbable.

  As things stand, despite the artists and photographers and occupants of new or newly renovated houses, Mott Haven remains the poorest neighborhood in all of the South Bronx, which remains the poorest congressional district, out of 435 such districts, in all of the United States. The median household income in the South Bronx as a whole is less than $24,000, according to the Bureau of the Census. In Mott Haven, according to figures released by New York City in 2011, it’s less than $17,000. The federally established poverty level for a household of five people is $26,000. Families of five are common in Mott Haven because of the doubling-up of relatives taken temporarily into an apartment where a mother and her children and, frequently, a grandmother are already living. Often, too, there may be a grown-up son who has a wife and children but who can’t obtain a rental subsidy and cannot find employment.

  Unemployment in the Bronx continues to be the highest in the city. An official estimate places it at 12.6 percent. When thirty-five jobs at minimum wage, with no benefits, opened up at a sneaker store close to Yankee Stadium in September of 2010, “more than 300 people showed up,” according to one press account, because of their desperation to find any work at all.

  But even the figure of 12.6 percent for the borough of the Bronx understates the jobless rate in its poorer areas. The Bronx encompasses middle-class and working-class communities in its northern and northeastern areas and the wealthy, semi-suburban neighborhood of Riverdale in its northwest corner. When unemployment figures are broken down by neighborhood, and when we add so-called “discouraged workers”—those who have given up looking for a job and are not included in government statistics—the actual unemployment rate in the St. Ann’s area is certainly a great deal higher than in the borough as a whole—and, according to people on the scene whose estimates have always been reliable, may well be twice as high.

  Those who can’t find honest jobs are not inevitably drawn into illegal ways of making money; but the temptation is certainly intensified. And dealing drugs is one of the surest ways of making money in a neighborhood where drug-ad
diction rates, as Benjamin can testify, continue to be high. In the immediate St. Ann’s area, Angelo recently pointed out a building, only three blocks from the church, where he said, with all too much apparent knowledge, that a heroin market presently was based. It turned out to be the building where Miranda, Pietro’s daughter, had been living. Angelo became concerned when I told him I’d been spending afternoons and evenings in the building, talking with Miranda and her little boy. He cautioned me not to go there after dark. (Miranda, I’m glad to say, has just moved out and found a new apartment in a better building.)

  “Things are quieter on the surface,” Ariella says. “The drug trade is less blatant now. The market has gone underground.” Crack cocaine “is still the inexpensive drug of choice, but heroin use is on the rise.” And, she says, “these are not just old-time addicts who’ve been using it for their entire lives, but much younger people, eighteen, nineteen, in their early twenties. This is something relatively new. … Also pharmaceuticals such as Oxycontin,” which, she says, “they crush and snort or liquefy and shoot.”

  One of the reasons drug sales are less evident, she says—and may, in fact, have been diminished somewhat in the neighborhood—is a greater watchfulness on the part of the police. “There’s a watchtower,” she told me in September, “set up by the police, close to the corner of Beekman Ave, almost in front of the building where Pineapple used to live. It’s a portable structure with a camera on the top. One officer sits inside and operates the camera. Another sits in a patrol car at the bottom of the tower. I think it’s helped to calm things down.”

  But the watchtower soon was moved away—“over to Brook Avenue,” she told me, where more shootings had occurred. “That’s the problem. The police are trying really hard, but the dealers move from place to place.” She asked if I had seen a story on a gang of dealers that had been controlling sales in a thirty-block-long section of the Bronx. “They were finally busted. It was a big story. I saw it in the Daily News.” According to the story, the gang had been collecting something like a million dollars every week from the sale of crack cocaine and cocaine in powdered form. On the same page of the Daily News, the paper also ran a story on a drug lord in East Harlem, in the area where Angelo was living when he got into trouble while he was in middle school, a short ride on the Number 6 train from the St. Ann’s neighborhood. The drug lord was arrested for running yet another major operation, this one also marketing cocaine. On his bedside, the Daily News reported, the drug lord kept a photograph of Al Pacino in his role as “Scarface.”

  Silvio’s hero.

  Twenty years before.

  It’s difficult, after talking to the people whom I’ve trusted most and known the longest in the Bronx, to come out with a balanced picture of the present situation. On some evenings, when I’m walking by myself in familiar neighborhoods, there is a sense that things are calmer and that life is safer for the children in these neighborhoods today. Then, all at once, another grim event takes place that darkens the spirits of people at St. Ann’s. A week after Ariella spoke to me with more optimism than she’d ever voiced before, the sixteen-year-old son of the woman who had been director of the education programs at St. Ann’s was shot and killed while walking in the street. “No reason!” Ariella said. “Two people stopped him and asked him a question. They didn’t like his answer, so they shot him fifteen times. …”

  Jeremy, who’d been working with the mother of the victim on a daily basis at St. Ann’s, was shaken badly, as were other people at the church. “Don’t get me wrong,” said Jeremy. “Many things”—he qualified this: “other kinds of things”—“are much better now. We have more stores. They’ve built a mall over there, near the bridge, close to the Grand Concourse. There’s a Target, Best Buy, Staples, and Home Depot. … I haven’t found a bookstore, but that may be next. …

  “But, then,” he said, “something like this happens, and it brings back all the fear. I still do not like walking around Beekman Ave and Cypress. To me, it’s still a scary place. I don’t go there if I can avoid it.”

  The building in which Jeremy lives is somewhat safer than before—although he told me, just two weeks ago, that he’d been awakened in the middle of the night when he heard six bullet shots outside his apartment. “When I come down on the elevator on my way to work, I have to be careful where I stand. This morning, there was fresh blood on the elevator floor.” The elevator, he noted, “still doesn’t like to come down to the lobby. Or else it does, but then, going up, it often stops between two floors. Last time it happened, I was at the tenth floor, or actually just below the floor. It simply stopped. There was a pregnant woman with me. The fire department finally came and helped us to climb out.”

  I told him that the building looked good from the outside.

  “Outside, yes. Go inside—it’s not.”

  The Diego-Beekman complex, on the other hand, has undergone a sweeping transformation in the past eleven years. In 1999, after years of protests on the part of tenants and a number of investigations and reports by government officials, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development made a series of demands to Mr. Schuster and his co-investors in Continental Wingate. The company decided it would be in its financial interest to reject the government’s demands and, instead, give up the buildings altogether.

  By this time, HUD already had begun investing public funds to make improvements in the buildings because, according to an agency official, “conditions … were horrendous.” And, after negotiations with the tenant leaders and those who were advising them, the government agreed to transfer ownership of the entire complex to the board of a nonprofit corporation that included tenant representatives but also, at the government’s insistence, several other people, one of whom was Martha, who had had experience in financial management.

  Martha is circumspect in speaking of the progress that has since been made. Drug dealers, she says, still attempt to force the locks or get into the buildings by breaking down the doors. But repairs are made more quickly. Security is better. And, in the buildings I’ve revisited last winter and this fall, the stairways and lobbies are much cleaner than before. Garbage and human waste no longer pile up on the basement floors, which are no longer breeding grounds for rats and vermin. Parents and their children, and the many older women living in these buildings, are no longer subject to the loss of self-respect they had to undergo when their rental payments and their housing subsidies went to a landlord in another city who seemed to be unburdened by a sense of basic decency. Instead, that money pays for a degree of dignity in their daily lives. By any standard, this is no small victory.

  The news about the schools is less auspicious. In spite of the efforts of many very good and innovative teachers who have a deep commitment to the children of the area, it would overstate the case to argue that the schools in which they work have been dramatically improved.

  At P.S. 65, a number of principals have come and gone since I started visiting. Each of them did what they could to bring improvements to the school, but these incremental victories soon would wash away. Part of the building has been taken over by a charter school, which makes things harder for the faculty and children by creating rivalries for space. There is one good piece of news, however, for the children at this school. The newest principal, appointed very recently, is the former fifth-grade teacher, Miss Harrinarine, who taught at P.S. 30 when Miss Rosa was the principal and whose class I liked to visit as often as I could—the teacher Leonardo used to entertain and whom Tabitha adored. If she cannot work a miracle at P.S. 65, I doubt that anybody can.

  Aida Rosa retired from P.S. 30 in 2002. After her departure, the school went through four different principals in a single year. A fifth principal, who began in 2003, has now moved on. A new principal was appointed earlier this year. The school is rated very high for its academic progress over recent years, but parents say that P.S. 30 no longer has the intimate and protect
ive feeling that Miss Rosa—“Mama Rosa,” as some of the little ones and their mothers used to call her—was able to engender. Here, too, a charter school now occupies a portion of the building.

  There are several other elementary schools serving the same neighborhood or neighborhoods nearby. Some are doing fairly well. Others, unhappily, are not. At one of these schools, not far from St. Ann’s, 60 percent of students failed to meet the minimal standards of the state last year. At another, 77 percent of children were in the failing category. All in all, there has been some very modest progress at the elementary level in Mott Haven, but it is uneven.

  Meanwhile, there are the charter schools, like those now sharing space with P.S. 65 and P.S. 30. Some of them, allegedly, are coming up with better scores than the larger public schools within the same community. But questions are inevitably raised as to whether they are offering higher levels of instruction or, as in the instance of the small academy that Jeremy attended for two unhappy years, simply drilling students more remorselessly on the narrow slice of subjects that are measured by the standardized exams. All of these schools, in any case, in the Bronx as elsewhere in the nation, serve only a small fraction of the student population, and students who do not conform to what the charter schools demand are frequently encouraged to go back into the public schools they came from.

  The middle schools of the South Bronx continue, with a few exceptions, to be disaster zones. At one of the middle schools somewhat to the north and west of St. Ann’s Church, only 11 percent of students have passing scores in English, and 14 percent in math. Another middle school, only eight blocks from the church—one that was highly rated, with good reason, in the 1990s when I looked at classes there—has subsequently lost the glories of its past. Only 21 percent of students now have passing scores in English, and 28 percent in math.