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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Lisette was coming up the avenue with a couple of her friends. When she saw her mother she ran into her arms. Taking a bunch of papers from her backpack, she showed her a book report she’d done that day at school. It had been marked A-plus by her teacher. Her mother studied the book report, kissed her on the cheek, then handed her the keys to the apartment and two dollars to buy something at the store.

  “An A-plus on a book report doesn’t mean a whole lot at this school she goes to,” Vicky said once Lisette was gone. “Her teachers like her. They do the best they can. But I don’t think that they can give her what a girl with her potential ought to have. …

  “You see, this is the best that I can get for her right now. I don’t accept it—yet I do, because I don’t know any choice I have.” But a moment after that her gaiety returned. “See?” she said. “I know she’s home. She’s safe upstairs and we have food to eat. And so, for now, I’m happy. There you go!”

  Her moods were like that. Sometimes sadness. Sometimes gaiety. Sometimes a bright burst of jubilation. Then she would crash down—so fast—into the pit of a depressive darkness. Then she would be fighting back again and searching for her jubilation like a person looking for an object that she’d put away into a drawer somewhere and temporarily could not be found. She laughed that nervous laugh, it seemed, when she was near the tipping point between exhilaration and surrender.

  In November 1996, a doctor called me from his office in a small town in Montana. He said his name was Dr. William Edwards. He told me that a group of people at his church had read my book Amazing Grace, about the children in the Bronx, and had called a meeting of their congregation. The members of the church, he said, decided that it was “appropriate” for them “to find a place in our community” for any family that believed they’d have a better chance in life in a setting very different from New York.

  I did not know how I should react to this idea at first. I’d never received a call like that from a total stranger and, although I knew almost nothing of Montana, I found it hard to picture any family that I knew beginning life all over in a place so far away, and so unlike New York.

  But the doctor’s explanations were so plain and simple—it was a nice town, he said, the schools were good, the congregation was prepared to find a house and fix it up and pay the rent at first and help out with the food expenses for a while, and he was a family doctor and had children and grandchildren of his own—that I told him I’d pass all this information on to Reverend Overall and that she would likely call him back if there was ever any interest from a family at St. Ann’s.

  I pass on a number of more modest offers and suggestions every year to ministers and teachers and other people working in poor neighborhoods and never know for sure if they’ll materialize. Some of them do. Churches and synagogues routinely ask me for the names of schools or churches in the Bronx and frequently they follow through with shipments of computers, books, and other educational materials. Religious congregations from as far away as Maine and Pennsylvania have invited groups of children from St. Ann’s to visit them for extended periods of time. But moving an entire family some 2,000 miles to a small town in Montana that I’d never heard of was in a different ballpark altogether.

  There’s another reason why I hesitated to respond to Dr. Edwards’s invitation. There is an intimidating rhetoric of cultural defensiveness in many inner-city neighborhoods like those of the South Bronx, which sometimes has the power to inhibit any actions that might tend to break down racial borders and to stigmatize the people who propose them as “invasive” or “paternalistic.” There is a kind of mantra that one often hears from local power brokers in neighborhoods like these that the way to “fix” a ghettoized community is, first of all, never to describe it in such terms and, second, to remain there and do everything you can to improve it and promote its reputation. Those who choose to leave are seen as vaguely traitorous, and those who help them leave are often seen as traitorous as well.

  Sometimes ideology and rhetoric like this can introduce an element of complicated and neurotic inhibition into issues that should be decided by the people they will actually affect. I wasted a few days debating whether to dismiss the whole idea and, at one point, I nearly threw away the name and number of the doctor. Then, to end my indecision, I sent the information he had given me to Martha and more or less forgot about it for a while. …

  A month later, in the middle of December, Vicky came into St. Ann’s in a state of desolation: beaten again, eyes purple, worried sick about her son, who was not attending school, worried about welfare, worried about clinic visits, worried about rent and food.

  The telephone in the office rang while she was sitting there talking to the pastor. “It was the doctor from Montana,” Martha told me later. I didn’t know if she had called him earlier that day or if the timing of his phone call was a sheer coincidence.

  “We had another meeting,” Dr. Edwards said. “The invitation is still there.”

  Martha told him, “Wait a minute,” and, looking at Victoria, she told her there was someone on the phone that she might like to talk with.

  “I had to leave the office then and go downstairs into the afterschool,” she said. “When I came back, Vicky and the doctor were still talking. When she put the phone down, I asked her what she thought. She reached out for my hands. It must have seemed unreal to her. I told her that she ought to give herself a lot of time to think about it and discuss it with the children. I gave her Dr. Edwards’s number and told her she could call him anytime she wanted, and I suggested that she ought to question him some more.

  “That was only about two weeks ago. Lisette came in today and said, ‘Guess what? We’re moving to Montana!’ ”

  About a week later, I went to Vicky’s home. I didn’t want to spoil her excitement, or that of the children, but I thought I ought to tell her some of the reservations I had had ever since the first call I’d received. My concerns, I quickly realized, were not hers. When I told her, for example, that there wasn’t likely to be more than a small number of black people in the town where she was going, she said that she already realized that.

  “You’re not concerned at leaving all your friends here, leaving everything you’re used to?”

  “I want to leave,” she said.

  The living room in which she slept was already filled with shipping boxes she had gotten from the church.

  “You’re sure that you can handle it?”

  “I won’t know unless I try,” she answered.

  Another week went by. …

  “In about two hours,” Martha told me on the phone, “Vicky and Eric and Lisette will reach their new home in Montana. Dr. Edwards had tears in his voice on the phone today when he called to check on the arrangements. The whole community seems to have gotten together to rent a house for them, and put in some furniture, and work out all the other details so that they’ll feel welcome when they get there. I think that everybody knows it isn’t going to be easy. …

  “Vicky was up all last night. I brought her a scale so she could weigh the packages for UPS. She told me she wanted to get her hair done but there wasn’t time because the kids were so excited that they were no help to her at all.

  “I think that she was happy with a kind of totally ‘free’ happiness I have never seen in her before. She spoke of taking up her knitting once again, and letter-writing, and she said she’d like to have a garden. She’ll be forty-eight in March.

  “A neighbor of Dr. Edwards used his frequent-flier miles to pay for the tickets, but there was some kind of glitch and we only got two tickets so I bought the third one—for Lisette. The woman at the desk gave her an upgrade to first class!

  “We had lunch at the airport. They were off at 2:00 p.m. I think they had to change planes in Chicago.”

  – II –

  One month later, on my answering machine: “Jonathan
, this is me, Vicky. Oh yes! I’m tellin’ you! I’m really here! I’m in Montana.”

  She left her number. I called her back as soon as I got home.

  “Jonathan!” It was the first time I had ever talked with her when she didn’t need to struggle to sound cheerful.

  “Have you ever eaten elk?”

  “No,” I said. “Are you eating elk?”

  “Yes!” she said.

  “Where do you get it?”

  “At the store.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It tastes like steak. You broil it. Delicious!”

  “How are the kids?”

  “They’re in school.”

  “Any problems?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Any black kids in the school?”

  “No,” she said, “except for them.”

  “Does that bother them?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied, “because they know it doesn’t bother me.”

  The only thing that bothered her, she said, was walking to the store. “People here? They drive real fast. And there isn’t any stop lights on this street at all. None on the next street either, come to think of it. None on the next street after that. In fact, there isn’t any stop lights anywhere in town.

  “And, oh! The girl next door—Diane?—she drives me from the IGA if I got too much to carry in my arms.

  “I’m tellin’ you! There’s a lot of friendly people here!

  “One lady came to bring me milk and asked me, ‘I don’t mean no harm, but are you prejudiced?’ I told her no, because I’m not. She looked at me and then the two of us began to laugh! Because—you know?—you’d think the question would have been the other way around. …

  “It’s like everybody wants to know: How did I ever get here? Well, I want to know that too! The only thing Dr. Edwards told me is that they was goin’ to choose someone. It was something they made up their minds about.”

  “What’s the church like?”

  “Made of logs.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Trinity Church.”

  “What denomination is it?”

  “Christian.”

  “What can you see looking out your windows?”

  “Mountains!” she replied. “They’re on almost every side.”

  “Is it snowing?”

  “Only in the mountains.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Beautiful!”

  “The day you got there, when you were coming off the plane—what was it like? Was Dr. Edwards waiting?”

  “Yes, he was there. Not only him. It seemed like everyone in town was there. They had their cars pulled up: twenty people, maybe more. Then Dr. Edwards took us to this house. He said, ‘This will be your home.’ Then he took us to the church. He said, ‘This will be your church.’ Then the stores began to send us food. Four stores. Each one gave us groceries: a hundred dollars from each store.

  “Oh, Jonathan! It’s cold here in the winter, but the hearts of people in this town are warm.”

  In the first days after she arrived, she said, she had to struggle to convince herself that she was really there. “The first night, after Dr. Edwards and his wife were gone? I told the children, ‘Leave me be. I need to sit here in this chair.’ I told them not to turn on no TV. It’s just as well, because they only got three stations here and one of them goes off at six o’clock.”

  “What’s the house like?”

  “Oh yeah! Well, I’m in the livin’ room right now. It would make up two of them that I used to have. I got two sofas. One of them’s a sofa-bed. Over at the other end, there’s a dining room and kitchen, which is kind of small, but they’re both connected, and I got a washer and a dryer, and I got a microwave which is up above the stove. Three bedrooms. One of them is mine. Other two is down the hall. Seems like it’s got everything I need.”

  “Where do kids there go for fun?”

  “To school. McDonald’s. Burger King. The IGA. To ranches. To the church. …”

  “They go to ranches?”

  “Me and Lisette, we went three days ago.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “Chrissy picked us up.”

  “Who’s Chrissy?”

  “One of my friends.”

  “Have you made many friends?”

  “Oh yes!”

  I heard shouting in the background.

  “Wait a minute. …”

  Then Lisette picked up the phone.

  I asked her whether everything was going good at school.

  “My school is fine!”

  “How big is it?

  “Fifteen students.”

  “In the school?”

  “No! In my class.”

  “Are the students nice to you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You feel okay? You’re happy there?”

  “I don’t want to live in any other place.”

  In April, Vicky sent me a big envelope of pictures of the mountains, and the ranch-like house in which they were living, and the one-story wooden church, which looked like a log cabin. In one of the photographs there were six or seven wooden houses, very tiny, at the bottom of the photo. Above the houses, filling nine tenths of the picture, there was a spectacular blue sky, with white and gray clouds rolling in from the distant mountains. A single tree, its slender branches reaching high. A small white pick-up truck beneath it. “Looking down the street,” she’d written on the back, “the sky goes on forever.”

  When I phoned her the next night, she told me she was spending more time at the church.

  “Sunday,” she said, “I put my name down on the list for Hospitality Committee.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You see, after the service here, we all go in and eat our meal together. Members of the church, we take turns cookin’ for each other. I wanted to make lemon cakes, because I’m good at bakin’. So I put my name down for next Sunday.”

  “How’s Lisette?”

  “Doin’ okay. Gettin’ B’s—but could get A’s, her teacher says. Needs to get her papers done. Do her homework every night. They give them a lot to do. This is something new to her.”

  When I asked the same thing about Eric, though, she sounded more uncertain.

  “He’s havin’ a harder time. Missed too much back in New York. No one here can figure out what they was doin’ with him at his school. Principal says they’re tryin’ hard to catch him up. Dr. Edwards’s talkin’ with him now.”

  “You sound good.”

  “I’m feelin’ good,” she said, “but I still have times when I get scared that something’s goin’ to go wrong. …”

  A few months later, at the start of June:

  “I got a job.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Bakin’ cookies, fryin’ donuts—at the IGA.”

  “What does it pay?”

  “Six dollars twenty-five.” She’d started with a part-time job at Burger King, she said, “but IGA pays better.”

  She said that Dr. Edwards gave the kids some spending money for a while after they arrived, “so they could do things with their friends.” But they didn’t need it now. Eric was working at the IGA—“couple of hours, after school.” Lisette, meanwhile, was baby-sitting for their neighbors. “She put up these little cards at the IGA. People call her. Mostly weekends. Mothers say she’s really good. Feeds the children. Washes them. Tells them stories. Gets them into bed. Sings them songs. If it’s late they drive her home.”

  In July, we talked again. She said she still was working at the IGA. “Doin’ thirty hours now. Rent here is four-fifty. Church covers t
wo-fifty and I pay the rest. Next month I’ll be payin’ fifty more. Long as I get thirty hours I think I can handle it.”

  She told me she had joined a group of women who were having problems like the ones that she’d been through, some of them with alcohol, but most of them related to abusive treatment at the hands of men. “I go to meetings at the church. Tuesday nights. Fifteen women. Some are single mothers, same as me. I was scared to talk at first. I’m talkin’ now. It’s hard for them to make me stop.”

  When we spoke the next time she told me that Lisette had done “something she shouldn’t do” and “got herself in trouble”—not bad trouble, it turned out, but enough to worry Vicky for a time. One of the girls she knew from school had been teaching her to drive. “Kids out here,” Vicky said, “they start to drive when they can reach the pedals!”

  “What’s the legal age?” I asked.

  “I think you have to be sixteen. But this is … something different here! They do it anyway.”

  The girl who had been driving, Vicky said, banged into another person’s car. Both the girls had to go to court. “The judge gave them a scolding and he made them pay a fine. They also have to pay the owner of the car for what they did. She’s been payin’ from her baby-sitting money. I think she owes him fifteen dollars more.”

  I asked if Dr. Edwards was still visiting a lot.

  “Oh yes! He’s here a couple times a week. Last week all of us had the flu. He came and gave us medicine and shots.”

  She said that he’d been taking them on long rides out into the wilderness to see the cattle ranges and the wild animal preserves. “He’s forever doing that. He loves his car. We went out with the kids this week to look at one of the abandoned mines.”

  “What kind of mines?”

  “Gold mines!”

  “How old is Dr. Edwards?”

  “Seventy? Sixty? I’d say maybe sixty-five. … He’s got grandchildren who are Lisette’s age. Two of them are girls.”