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

by Jonathan Kozol

  Young as she was, and shy and understated as she’d always been, Miranda had to cope with the reality that, at least in economic terms, she was suddenly, as she put it, “out there on my own.” She had to find a job, and find a place she could afford to live, and this, in turn, compelled her to drop out of school before she could complete her senior year.

  After a number of fits and starts, she pulled herself together and was able to obtain a job, then a series of different jobs, none of which paid very well but gave her nonetheless her first experience of even partial self-reliance. One of the earliest jobs she got, which had been assigned to her under New York’s workfare regulations, was, she said, “a short-term thing, clean-up work, raking leaves and stuff like that” in the public parks, “but only for six months,” after which she found her way into longer-lasting jobs.

  “One of them was over there at Yankee Stadium,” she said, “doing counter work.” Another job was “at a bakery on 82nd Street near Madison,” where she was on a part-time basis, what she termed “on-call,” but she said, “they called a lot.” When she wasn’t working at the bakery, she braided hair for women on the sidewalk of East Tremont Avenue. “I’d set up a chair outside. I might make a hundred dollars in an afternoon if I had three customers.”

  At one point, she also said, “I took a course in home care,” and soon was getting long-term jobs taking care of people who were ill and needed a companion to look after them. She told me she enjoyed this work. “It was mostly older women. They reminded me of Grandma.”

  At this time, while Christopher was still away in prison and Grandma and Pietro were living in their rented room, Miranda, who was almost twenty and had led a very careful life in terms of her relationships with men, became, she said, a bit less careful “with a guy I’d always known and thought of as a friend, not in the romantic way. Then one night, you can guess. First time in my life. And, presto! I was pregnant. …”

  While she was pregnant, she continued working for one of the women, who, she told me, “lived up there in Riverdale”—a mostly white and affluent community. But, as her pregnancy advanced and she began to have some spells of dizziness and weakness, she said that she passed out one night in the lady’s living room. She was permitted to come back to work. “But, only two weeks after that, I passed out again.” At the hospital, she was diagnosed with dehydration and anxiety and was told it was not wise for her to work for the remainder of her pregnancy.

  This time, it seems, the welfare system worked the way it ought to work for women in her situation. As an expectant mother, she was placed on rent assistance and provided with the welfare benefits, including food stamps, she would need to take care of her baby. By the time her son was born, she had found a small apartment in the St. Ann’s neighborhood. After another year had passed, she took on a part-time job. Her little boy was cared for by a neighbor in the afternoons while she was at work.

  This, then, was her situation at the time when Christopher, after having served nearly the full length of his sentence, with the reduction of a single year that had been commuted to parole, returned to the South Bronx.

  – III –

  “When Christopher came out of prison,” said Miranda, “I was the only one who had a home that he could come to. He was my brother. I had my hands full with my baby and my job, so I didn’t know what I should do, but he had no other place. I was his ‘security,’ he told me. You can see how little space I have”—she gestured to her bedroom and a smaller room that held the baby’s bed, and the very tiny living room in which she had no furniture other than the sofa we were sitting on—“but I took him in. …

  “I gave him my bed and I slept on the couch, because you know how tall he is. I washed his clothes. I cooked his meals. He used to tell me he was ‘getting things together,’ but he was out late almost every night. Sometimes he’d be out until the morning.”

  I was not surprised when she said he broke the terms of his parole within a year after he got out of prison. “He went back twice, each time for about six months. The second time was in 2004, I think—or maybe in 2005.” When he was out, he was back in her apartment. “He managed to get little jobs. He was a good talker. But he couldn’t hold them. He was late too many times and people got fed up with him.” Even when he had a job, “there was always something else going on that he wouldn’t talk about. …

  “Finally,” she said, “he got a really good job in Manhattan at an exercise salon called Equinox. He told me how much money he was making and the people he was meeting. He had been bulked-up in prison,” where, he told her, he’d been lifting weights and doing other body-building exercises. “He was in terrific shape. … But even then, when he was making money, he wouldn’t help me with the food. He spent his money on himself. Stupid things. He bought himself expensive clothes. He bought a car, an old red Honda, from a friend, but he would get angry with me when I asked if he would drive me to my job or help me with the rent, the part of it that I was s’posed to pay.

  “I was overworking myself, rushing off to do my job, doing everything I could to take care of my baby, filling out the forms I had to do to keep my rent assistance. Lots of forms for different things. Plus, also checking up on Daddy, going there to make sure he and Grandma were okay. Christopher, when he came back from work, just layin’ there. … I was only twenty-four. Christopher was thirty. But he wouldn’t help me.”

  Christopher finally quit his job at Equinox, she said. “By this time, I knew that he was doing stuff he shouldn’t do because he had a lot of cash. It seemed like he was making more than he had made at Equinox.

  “At last I told him he would have to leave.” She spoke about this with a sense of sorrow at her inability to keep him there and, as I suspect she may have wistfully believed, to function as a counterforce, by her availability and physical proximity, against his seemingly compulsive inclination to do almost anything that would get him into trouble once again. But, she said, “I had no choice. I was afraid of breaking down. The tension was too much for me.”

  During this time, Pietro kept in contact with me, mostly in long letters written from the room that he was sharing with his mother. His letters began, typically, on a long and crowded page, would continue on another page if he had another piece of paper, and then on smaller scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes or whatever other bits of paper he might have around.

  What came across consistently was the comfort he received from knowing that Miranda never let too many days go by without checking up on him and that her sister’s situation with her husband and his family seemed secure and, of course, the happiness he took in seeing his new grandson when Miranda brought him there to visit him.

  His greatest worry had to do with Grandma, who was over eighty-five years old by now and had started to display the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. He came back to their room one night and found she wasn’t there and had to go into the streets and look around for several blocks until he found her sitting on a corner, looking lost and scared. He recognized that he might need to put her in a nursing home before too long and, because he’d never lived without her since his wife had died, I think he felt a sense of dread, perhaps the kind of panic that a child might have felt—as if his mother’s presence in his life gave him his only sense of continuity and safety.

  A few months later: “The time I feared the most has come. God knows how hard it is to be apart from her. The days are not the same.” But, he wrote, “it’s safe to say it was the right decision. I know she’s getting the right diet, healthy meals. People there making sure she gets her medicines on time.”

  He reminisced about an afternoon when he was in the Martinique and Grandma had invited me to join them for Thanksgiving. “My mother was so proud that she could make a real Thanksgiving dinner for us on a hot plate, which was all we had. I know you will remember this, because you wrote about it in your book.” He made a reference to one of the
guards at the hotel who refused to let me go upstairs at first and made me wait there in the lobby for an hour without telling them that I was there. “But we did it! Grandma kept the dinner warm. And she was so happy. Thank God for those memories!”

  A year later: “As you can see, I got some paper I can write on.” After telling me he’d seen his mother “at the home,” he reverted to his thoughts about the time we’d met and he told me something that he’d never said before. “In all honesty,” he wrote, “I didn’t trust you at the start. So many people coming there at Christmastime. … Feel good about themselves. Looking at the horror show. Land of the Living Dead. …” He said he didn’t start to trust me until I kept coming back. “I’m glad you did, because you got to know us good. And you got to know the girls.” That, he said, “is something that I’m thankful for.”

  He also reminisced about a pleasant kind of teasing, a good-natured to-and-fro, that had evolved between us, after we had gotten to be friends, because of the baseball rivalry between New York and Boston. He was, of course, a Yankees fan. When I told him I had lived most of my life in Boston, he could not resist the opportunity to convey his sympathies to me every time Boston came to play there in the Bronx. In his letters, he continued teasing me. It was something trivial, but light-hearted and familiar, that he was holding on to even when the other items in a letter were not light at all.

  In three of his letters he went into detail about Christopher. In the first letter, which had followed shortly after Christopher came home from prison but before he started breaking his parole, Pietro sounded somewhat optimistic. “My son just got a job about a week ago. He’s doing well, Jonathan, and with the job I think that he feels good about himself. … Good news there. He’s acting more responsibly.”

  Another letter: “I seen my son today. Miranda brought him here to visit me. He says he’s going to apply to college.” I didn’t want to second-guess Pietro, but I wondered whether Christopher might have had in mind one of those job-related institutes that many people in the poorest neighborhoods who have only meager education, and little understanding of distinctions between different kinds of higher education, speak of interchangeably as “colleges.” It didn’t seem believable to me that, after all the years of schooling he had missed, he would have the rudimentary skills that would be prerequisites for college.

  But there were two lines in the letter that I wanted very much to find believable. “Christopher,” Pietro said, “told me, ‘You look good, Pop.’ He hugged me, Jonathan! He said he wanted to see more of me.”

  The comfort he derived from this one moment of affection did not, however, last for long. In a subsequent letter he appeared crestfallen because of a painful confrontation that his son provoked by what amounted to an act of thievery from Grandma.

  Grandma, as I’ve mentioned, had a blind spot when it came to Christopher, and her inability to gauge his sense of judgment, as well as his ethical reliability, had worsened with the onset of dementia. At some date I’ve been unable to pin down, she had given Christopher the legal right to oversee financial matters for her, such as a small widow’s pension she received and which she’d been using through the years to help Pietro and the children—all three children, and not solely Christopher.

  It turned out there was an accumulation of a fair amount of money in her pension fund of which, apparently, she’d been unaware. Christopher, according to Miranda, “decided that he had the right to take this money for himself” and not share it with his sisters. “Daddy was opposed to this. He knew that Grandma still might have expenses that we’d need to pay for while she was still living.” Whatever was left upon her death, Pietro said, should be divided equally.

  In his letter, Pietro did not go into these details. He simply said, “My son has disappointed me. He’s trying to get hold of money that does not belong to him. When I told him I would not permit this, he was very rude to me. I told him, ‘I’m your father. You’re my son. I want you to obey me.’ ” But Christopher, he said, had suddenly grown cold again. “My son has turned away from me.”

  Miranda said that it was worse than that. “When Daddy said it wasn’t right for him to take the money, my brother really slammed him—‘I’m the one in charge of things.’ He could be a monster.”

  Starting in the winter of 2005, about a year after Grandma went into the nursing home, there were references in Pietro’s letters to difficulties he was having with a growing weakness in his arms and legs, which, according to the doctors he had seen, was the consequence of a debilitation of bone structure.

  The factors that had led to this debilitation were something of a mystery to me, and they would remain so. It may be that he was leaving something out. It may be that he did not entirely understand whatever explanation or whatever diagnostic possibilities a doctor had conveyed to him. He did say it was growing hard for him to keep on with the work he had been doing. Apart from packing bags and bringing them to the homes of older people who did not have strength enough to carry them, he also had a part-time job for a man who owned a furniture and dry-goods store. He would pay Pietro as much as forty dollars in a day for moving heavy pieces out onto the sidewalk for display and moving them inside again when the store was closing.

  “Jonathan,” he said, “I’m only fifty-five years old, but my legs are giving up on me.”

  Within another year he had to give up both these jobs as his body had progressively grown weaker. In one of the last letters that he sent me, he indicated that his health had gone into a steep decline. In the same letter he also said that he had moved into another rented room, which he thought might be the reason why the letters I was writing were not reaching him or, if he got them, only after long delays.

  “Jonathan, my friend,” he wrote, “I got two letters from you in one day and I have so much to say. My health is broken but my hands aren’t broken, so I still can write to you. …

  “These are trying times for me. Some days there is nothing left except my will. I know that God in His ways has some reason for what has befallen me, but I can’t surrender for my children’s sake. I need a lot of doctor care and I’m keeping my appointments but I feel I’m fighting without weapons.”

  He spoke of “God’s intentions” for him in this time of weakness, and later in the letter he made a reference to God’s “plan,” which he said he did not know but that he knew he had no other choice but to accept.

  Pietro rarely spoke to me about religion in the years I’d known him, but Miranda said he’d been religious as a child and had gone to church each Sunday with his mother until he was twelve years old. It seemed that in his sickness he was reaching back for this. He also spoke again about how much he’d counted on his mother and how much he missed her. God and Grandma seemed to come together at this moment in his memory.

  In the only other letter he had strength to write, he said that he was “counting up my blessings. … Both my daughters grew up into healthy women. In the days in the hotel I never thought we’d get this far. I didn’t dare to think ahead. So that’s one thing I’m thankful for. Ellie has her children and Miranda has her little boy. And she’s been so good to me and kind to me and patient with me, Jonathan! I guess you know she’s always been my angel and I know she’s strong of heart and she’s out there kicking. God knows she took a licking. Won’t say more about that now. …

  “Hope my writing’s not too bad. Please excuse. Out of paper.

  “Goodbye Friend. Until next time, Pietro.”

  It was not long after that before Miranda had to move him to a place that she first referred to as “a rehabilitation center” but which, as she clarified this later, was actually a hospice for chronically ill people. He was in a wheelchair now, she told me. On occasion, if a friend who had a car would help her, she would bring him to her home to visit and have dinner, and her sister and her children would come over. I noticed that she didn’t say whether Christoph
er was there, and I didn’t ask her.

  Pietro had a stroke that winter and, although he partially recovered, the damage to his heart and pulmonary function, according to the doctor that Miranda spoke to, left him with a very poor prognosis. It was, the doctor said, unlikely that he would survive for long.

  At the end, Miranda said, “he was going back and forth into the hospital. He went in a final time a couple weeks before he died. He had the nerve to ask me for a cigarette! He cursed me out when I said they wouldn’t let him smoke there. And, besides, I told him that I didn’t have one anyway. So then I said, ‘Okay, Daddy, I’ll go out and buy you some.’ He cursed me out some more, but it was all in fun. … Two days later, he was dead. I’d signed the DNR six months ahead.”

  Pietro’s death preceded that of Grandma by only a few months. He never did achieve the reconciliation with his son that he had prayed for. Of all the disappointments he had undergone, it was this, Miranda said, that she believed had been most painful for him.

  Pietro’s long-enduring anguish over Christopher was, of course, a very different matter from the kind of long, lamenting sorrow Vicky underwent as Eric slipped away from her. And Miranda’s often torturous relationship with Christopher, for as long as she could keep him in her home, was obviously very different from the bond between Lisette and Eric, who had not subjected her to the financial exploitation that Miranda underwent. Still, there are similarities. The survival and the stamina of the younger sister and the growing hardness and the loss of stable bearings in the older brother are what I had in mind in saying, as I did, that I did not look for “patterns” but could not escape the sense that there were parallels.

  Christopher and Eric were not the only boys I knew who received their first induction into cynical behavior, distancing, dishonesty, and patterns of evasiveness in the homeless shelters and in the years that followed when they were resettled in impoverished neighborhoods that had the fewest services of social intervention on the part of public institutions. Christopher’s story stands apart for me, however, because I was present, physically, repeatedly, at the point of incubation. I saw that look of hunger in his eyes. I saw him wolfing down that cereal and milk. I saw him running out into the traffic when the cars slowed down on Broadway, hoping for a couple dollars to be handed through a window. I also knew he’d seen the needle-users buying what they needed in the hallways and the stairways of the Martinique Hotel. He probably saw them shooting up as well. I could not forget this.