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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Although the members of the church helped her get resettled, she fell into a state of bad depression once again and, having earlier been careful about overuse of alcohol—a couple of beers late at night when she came home from work, maybe something stronger on the weekends when she was relaxing with a friend—she now began to drink much sooner in the day in order to subdue the feelings of foreboding that had overtaken her.

  “After doing a good job at the nursing home,” Dr. Edwards wrote to me, “and having recently been given a nice raise in pay, she abruptly quit. She simply was unable to get up and out into the world and face the pressures of the day. Alcohol and antidepressant medications, as you know, can be a deadly brew. I’m going to start all over, if she’ll let me, with another intervention.”

  In a follow-up note in May, he was more hopeful, but cautiously so. “Vicky has joined a twelve-step program. It was begun by a young physician here in Bozeman, an excellent man who, unhappily, developed an addiction—to Demerol, I think—while he was in training, and is very good and sensitive with people in her situation. He’s been successful with a number of my patients but in Vicky’s case I have to say I’ve got my fingers crossed. She’s fallen deep into her drinking. I don’t know if she can stop.” When I asked what she was living on, he said she was on welfare and, he thought, she might be doing part-time work when she was well enough to handle it.

  It was more than seven months after that before I heard from Vicky. Her phone had been cut off again after her eviction, but she said, “I got a new phone now.” To my surprise, and a bit to my confusion, she sounded upbeat and excited when she called.

  “Oh yes! You know what I did? I took the bus to Georgia and I saw my Daddy! He’s seventy-four. I hadn’t seen him since I was fourteen. His birthday was on Christmas Day. I made him a sweater. Same as yours, except in green.

  “Did I tell you that my father’s a musician? Yes! He’s in a gospel choir. They were having a rehearsal on the day before I left. I said, ‘Daddy, you’re going to rehearsal. Would you let me come with you?’ My father was so happy!”

  She didn’t say a word about the latest difficulties Dr. Edwards had described. Not a mention of the job she’d given up, the twelve-step program she’d begun, the struggle she’d been going through to fight off her depression. And she said nothing this time in reference to her son. The same sense of disconnect I’d noted in our conversations from the year before left me with a great deal of uneasiness again.

  In his letters, Dr. Edwards’s references to Eric had become increasingly disheartening. “I’ve tried again and again to sit him down and talk with him, but he isn’t interested, doesn’t want to listen, doesn’t want to tell me anything at all.” He said that Eric’s girlfriend had ended their relationship. He also said he had some reason to believe that Eric and his friends were “gravitating into drugs or stolen pharmaceuticals.” He noted, too, that Eric was now living in his own apartment and, by all appearances, paying his own rent. So he said he had to wonder where the money came from.

  In the summer of that year—it was now 2001—he told me Vicky was no longer showing up for meetings at her twelve-step program. He also said she’d moved again, and more than once, as I discovered later. “I stopped by to visit with her just a week ago. She’d been drinking heavily. It was hard to get straight answers from her. It’s as if she’s sitting there just waiting for the bad news she’s expecting.”

  Six weeks went by.

  “Jonathan,” Vicky said in a message on my phone. “I have something terrible to tell you. I lost my son two days ago. Eric was shot—shot with a shotgun to his head. He would have been twenty-two this Sunday.” She left me her phone number. When I called her back, he voice was blurred and breaking. “I don’t know how to say this,” she began. “My son has taken his own life. …

  “Day he died, I’d called him in the mornin’. He said that he was with his friends, playin’ cards and havin’ fun.” Then, all of a sudden, she reported, Eric sounded very scared. “ ‘Mummy, I don’t feel no good. I need your help.’ I said, ‘Okay. Come over here right now.’

  “A few minutes later, he was at the door. He came in by his self, and then his friends came in. I didn’t know why he let them come with him, but I was thinkin’ they’ll be gone and then he’ll be alone with me. They went into another room and it was quiet for a while. Then I heard it, right behind the wall, and I went in and saw the shotgun layin’ there across the floor. There was blood all over him. It was comin’ from his head. …

  “Next thing, the police was there. Police was comin’ up the stairs. Then they was tryin’ to revive him. Then they put him on a stretcher and they carried him downstairs and took him to the hospital, but they said I shouldn’t come. But fifteen minutes after that another man from the police, he took me with him in his car and said that he would stay with me. Then a doctor came out from the door and he got up and spoke to him, and then he sat down next to me and held my hands and told me that my son was dead.

  “He asked me was there anyone I would want to contact and I told him Dr. Edwards. But Dr. Edwards, he’d already heard. And he came in and he was there and he took me to my house. And then his wife. And other people from the church. They wouldn’t let me be alone. And, after that, Lisette was there. And Dr. Edwards’s wife went outside to talk with her.”

  I asked her whether anybody close to him, anyone who cared for him, had told her that he was depressed before she spoke with him that day.

  “No one. No one knew. He just kept it in. I told Lisette I pray from this she’ll always tell me what she’s feelin’ when she’s feelin’ bad. ‘Never hold it in,’ I said, ‘because I been there and I love you and I couldn’t bear it if I lost you too. …’ ”

  Dr. Edwards mourned for Eric like the father he had tried to be for him. He condemned himself for never having found a way to penetrate those walls of isolation in which Eric had enclosed himself. “Starting months ago,” he said, “I had my struggles about being the prime mover, asking whether everything that he was going through was somehow of my doing. I’ve tried to come to peace with this, but I haven’t given up my questioning. It’s going to be a long time, I’m afraid, before I do.

  “There are some who are convinced it was a homicide. Several of his friends, as I believe you know, had followed him into that room, and no one has explained what they were doing when that shot rang out. But the police have interviewed the boys and studied the case carefully, and all the evidence seems to confirm it was a suicide.”

  Again and again, he came back to the question of his own responsibility. “I realized there were going to be problems from the first time Vicky opened up to me. And after she had been here for a while she confided in me more and she told me quite a lot of what the kids had undergone when they were in New York. But I overestimated the potential of a different place and different opportunities to overcome what I had hoped they’d left behind.”

  Weeks after Eric’s death, I found that I kept coming back to what Vicky said he’d told her on the phone. “Mummy, I don’t feel no good. I need your help”—and her reply, “Come over here right now.” For all of the defensive toughness and aloofness others saw in him, he had spoken to his mother in that moment in the way that frightened children do. If he had only come alone and told her what he feared, might she have held him in her arms and given him the sense of safety he was asking for? Could she have been for him, in the hour when he needed it, the mother she herself had never had?

  From that time on, Dr. Edwards and those members of the church who were Vicky’s closest friends did everything they could to help her and Lisette to reconstruct at least some semblance of stability. Lisette regained her footing rather quickly. She was now a senior and continued getting honors grades and was making plans to go to college. She was, Dr. Edwards said, “a mature and capable young woman” and “happily in love” with an only slightly older man,
a student at the university—“a serious and decent guy by the name of Thomas who is very much in love with her as well.” He said that she’d been living with him for a time, but it seemed important to him to explain that they were “married under common law” which, he wanted me to know, “is binding in Montana.”

  A short time later, he told me she was pregnant but he was confident that this would not prevent her graduating high school and proceeding with her plans for higher education. “We had dinner with them, and Lisette made clear that she has no intention of returning to New York. She’s looking at some colleges around Atlanta now. She and Thomas seem to have a good perspective on the choices they’ll be making. As a couple, they seem very solid, very strong.”

  Vicky, on the other hand, continued to be almost inconsolable. “I went over there to visit her the other night. She told me she was drinking. But she didn’t need to tell me. I could see that she was pickled when she came to the front door. I’d been told she was starting a new job, but there’s no way she could have gone to work in the condition that I saw.”

  I spoke with Vicky very seldom after that. Usually her voice was faint and her words were often slurred and the little information that she chose to share with me was never very clear. Before long, there were no more messages from Vicky on my phone. I didn’t know if she had moved again. The most recent number she had given me appeared to be cut off.

  In one of the final letters that he sent me, Dr. Edwards said, “I don’t see Vicky anymore, which saddens me, but she no longer seeks my company. I’ve tried my best to keep in touch. My wife and I drive over there from time to time, but we never find her home and the messages I leave for her are not returned.”

  Eight months after Eric died, I received a very grown-up and reflective letter from Lisette. “Since my brother was laid down to rest, my mother has been struggling. Dr. Edwards says he told you she’s been drinking. She was broken by my brother’s death. I love her, but I have to use my strength to save myself.

  “Thomas and I are doing our best to pay our bills and taking good care of our daughter. We were married in a church on May 15. I graduate next week. Then we’re going to move south so I can enter college in September.”

  She said that they had changed their plans and were looking at a town near Myrtle Beach because her husband’s relatives were living in that area. Her husband had applied for transfer to a college there, which she would be attending too.

  They must have moved soon after that. I wasn’t sure if she received the letter I had sent her in reply. Dr. Edwards, who was well into his seventies by now, was no longer able to maintain the pace he used to keep, and he soon retired. Within another year or so, he told me he had lost all contact with Lisette and Vicky. Many years went by before I got word of them again.

  It came in a phone call from South Carolina in 2009. Lisette still had a little of that buoyant schoolgirl voice that had endeared her to so many people in her teenage years, but she was twenty-six by now, the mother of four children. With time taken off to raise the children, she was heading toward completion of her studies to become a paralegal. Her husband was completing a degree in dentistry.

  Her mother, she said, had suffered greatly in her final years from pancreatic cancer. “Her social worker called me from Montana and told me she would probably not live for very long. We brought her here to stay with us. She started chemotherapy. We took her to a hospital in Charleston to receive her treatments and we thought that she was doing well, until she just stopped eating. She had lived eleven months. She died at home with our kids around her. She’s buried at the cemetery with my husband’s family.”

  In her final words she said, “I’m going to give a good life to my children. I have to do it. I’m the one who made it through. I’m a stronger person now. I guess that I was always stronger than I knew.

  “Please give my love to Martha when you speak to her. And if you’re ever here near Myrtle Beach we would love to have you come and visit us. We have room for you to stay. If you like, I’ll take you out to see my mother’s grave. I know how much she meant to you.

  “Okay? I have to go! Say a prayer for me!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Pietro and His Children

  No two parents I encountered in the late years of the 1980s and the early 1990s could have seemed more different from each other than Pietro Locatello and Victoria. Distinct from one another in their family histories and in the make-up of their families, in their quirks of personality and qualities of character, not to speak of the most obvious distinctions, which were their race and gender, the only common bond that I could see at the time when we became acquainted was the fact that both had fallen into homelessness at the same unhappy time in New York City’s history and that both were very fragile people when they went into the shelters.

  Pietro had been a doorman and a maintenance worker at a building in Manhattan when his wife was strangled on the beach at Coney Island by one of several men with whom she’d been involved during her years of marriage to Pietro. The man, apparently, was a narcotics user and had killed her in a fit of jealousy when she told him she had other lovers. Pietro was emotionally dependent on his wife and for this reason, as I gather, had forced himself to tolerate her infidelities. After her death, his world fell apart. For a long time after that he could barely function.

  His wife had left him with three children. Pietro’s mother, a widowed woman in her sixties, moved in to help him with the children, and this had made it possible to keep the kids together. But Pietro was too shaken to continue with his full-time job and, even with the part-time jobs he somehow pieced together, he fell behind on rental payments and the family was, at last, evicted. It was this that led him to take recourse to the city’s homeless system, and this in turn had brought him to the bleak and narrow room in which I would get to know him in the Martinique Hotel.

  On the day before Christmas 1985, one of the social workers I have mentioned who enabled me to get into the building introduced me to Pietro when I was in his office. The social worker told him, as he felt obliged to do, that I was a writer and that I would like to do some interviews with families in the building. Pietro seemed to hesitate at first, then asked if I would like to come upstairs and see where he was living. He gave me his room number and I told him I’d be back there in the evening.

  The children—Christopher, ten years old, Ellie, who was five, and Miranda, four—were in their beds by the time that I had gotten past the guards and climbed the stairway to their room. The girls were asleep. Christopher was still awake and fully dressed, sitting on the top bunk of the three-bunk bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A tall boy for his age, vigilant and tense in his expression, and unnaturally pale, he had an emaciated look. So, too, did his father. Pietro, who was over six feet tall and whose weight had dropped from 165 to 120 in the two years he’d been living here, had a skeletal appearance.

  His mother—“Grandma,” as he and the children called her—was not there when I arrived. She had fallen in the stairwell on the night before and was at the hospital, Pietro said, for a check-up to make certain that she had no major injuries.

  The room appeared at first to be unheated. Then Pietro pointed out to me that in the window opposite the beds there was a broken pane of glass that he had covered over with a sheet of garbage plastic but which still admitted cold air from outside.

  That night, and on later nights when I returned, Christopher said very little. As with other children I would meet that winter, it was obvious to me that he was often hungry and perhaps was wondering if I had some food with me. Seeing that look, I’d sometimes give Pietro ten or twenty dollars so he could go across the street and stock up on food supplies. Or else, if I was sure that I could get in past the guards again, I’d go out and buy some milk and cereal and other items on my own. Christopher would climb down from the bed and eat the cereal in silence. He made it c
lear that he had no special wish to talk with me. I had the sense that he regarded me distrustfully.

  Like other boys about his age, he would go out in the afternoons and evenings to panhandle in the traffic on Sixth Avenue or Broadway or else, on the opposite side of Herald Square, on the sidewalk out in front of Macy’s. His father did not want to let him do this but, he told me, “At his age, I simply cannot keep him in a cage within this room. It feels like a prison to him. All his friends are out there in the streets. He wants to be there with them.”

  Christopher had apparently become adept at extracting money from the tourists and commuters, and now and then he brought some of the money home or used it to buy presents for his sisters. Mostly, however, he was using it to pay for meals while he was out, his father said, or else to pay for cheap and gaudy-looking trinkets (phony gold chains and the like) that were popular among his friends, many of whom were older than he was.

  Pietro worried that a boy as young as Christopher might attract the notice of police, although there were so many boys doing the same thing that this may have been unlikely. But he had another reason for concern. Christopher was a handsome boy. His white-blond hair, unkempt as it was, pale blue eyes, and sharp-featured jaw made him a target, as his father feared, for older men he might encounter in the streets.

  The following year, a man who came into the Martinique with one of the groups that organized activities for children in the shelter began to buy him presents—“Frisbee things that lighted up,” his father said, “inexpensive things at first”—but then he bought him an expensive coat and took him off one weekend to a country house somewhere on Long Island without Pietro knowing where he was.