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

by Jonathan Kozol

  First, she learned that she had cancer in her large intestine and needed to have surgery. She had, in all, three operations, and they were successful. But in the months before she had regained her strength, her husband, who, she said, had always been a drinker, began to drink more heavily. He soon became abusive to her, verbally at first, then physically.

  Unlike many women in these situations, Alice was not willing to tolerate this treatment in the hope that things might change. One night after he had raised his hand to her and struck her—only once, but that was enough for her—she made up her mind to leave him to his drinking and get out of the house in which they had been living since their children had been born.

  She had three children, two of whom were teenage girls. The other was a boy of twelve. Unable to continue working while she was recovering from surgery—she had been a secretary for most of the twenty years since she completed high school and a two-year business course—she had no option but to turn to welfare and to look for shelter to the same chaotic agencies that others in her situation needed to depend upon.

  She and her children ended up at one of the EAUs that Ariella had described and which I later visited. For several nights the city was unable to assign her to a shelter. When a place was finally found, it was in a small hotel, but she never got beyond the door. When she arrived at 1:00 a.m., she was told the hotel had no space for her. At 2:00 a.m., back at the EAU, she was forced to sign a paper formally refusing placement at the hotel that had just refused her.

  They spent another seven nights at the EAU, after which they were sent to one of the more notorious shelters in the city, a hotel called the Holland, which was on 42nd Street, a few blocks from Times Square.

  At the time when they were sent there, only certain floors of the hotel, those in greatest disrepair, were used to house the homeless. The floor where Alice and her children stayed had no running water. “Even the toilet had no water,” Alice said. “We had to carry buckets to a bar across the street,” where someone from the bar came out on the sidewalk with a hose and filled the buckets for them, because homeless people weren’t allowed inside.

  “I couldn’t let my children live like that,” she said.

  Two days later, returning to the EAU, she had to sign another document in which she rejected the shelter they had found for her and was given a “referral slip” that she was told she must deliver to a welfare center in another part of town. She spent the next day waiting at the welfare center before they shut the doors on her and told her that they couldn’t help her. It was a long while after that before the people at the EAU figured out what they would do with her.

  Finally, after forty-five days of homelessness, Alice and her children were provided with a small room—four beds, two chairs, and a tabletop refrigerator—in the Martinique Hotel. They would live there for the next four years.

  It was in the Martinique, in the second week of January, 1986, that she and I first met. She was standing near the elevator on the seventh floor, talking with a man, another resident of the hotel, whom I had met a couple nights before. We chatted only briefly and she made a few sardonic cracks about the garbage piled up and spilling out of barrels all around us on the landing. When I happened to remark that I had seen the manager, Mr. Tuccelli, downstairs in the lobby, she told me to be careful when he was around but, before she could continue, the elevator opened. Two unfriendly-looking guards came out. She cut the conversation off abruptly and went down the stairs.

  The following day, however, when she saw me near the social workers’ office in a hallway on the second floor, she walked right up to me and picked up on our interrupted conversation and invited me to come and visit in her room. In the next few months we came to be good friends.

  What attracted me to Alice from the very start was her irreverent sense of humor and her absolute refusal to succumb to the passivity that was induced in many of the others who were living in the Martinique. A natural leader among women in the building, she had an acerbic wit and a sophisticated sense of well-directed anger that enlivened her perceptions and opinions. When I ventured an opinion of my own that she believed to be naïve, she didn’t hesitate to tell me so directly. I sensed that she enjoyed these opportunities to take me down a peg or two because it soon enabled us to move beyond the usual banalities that dominate an “interview relationship” and to get to know each other on a far more equal basis than is common in these situations.

  She was a politically sophisticated woman. When she came upon a story in one of the papers that offended her intelligence, she would cut it out and write her often pungent comments in the margins. Understatements and omissions in the daily press in stories on the homeless and places like the Martinique stirred up her indignation. The organized abuse of women in the building, she believed, would have made front-page headlines in the press if those who were the victims were not overwhelmingly black and Latino. When I was initially reluctant to agree with her, she grew impatient and she said, “Come on! You know they wouldn’t tolerate disgusting things like this for women like your mother or your sister!”

  Alice was a good “decoder” of the words and subtle biases and innuendoes in news stories. It was she who pointed out to me, for instance, that the papers were referring to the presence of so many homeless people in this section of Manhattan as essentially a sanitation problem. Plumbing imagery was being used in speaking of “a back-up” in the homeless population, which had caused “the overflow” to spill into the old hotels around Times Square.

  “They already know the place to put their sewage,” Alice noted cuttingly. “They haven’t yet decided where to put their homeless people. But I promise you it won’t be anyplace where they will have to see us every morning.”

  She was right, of course; and when the city, as I’ve noted, started shutting down these big midtown hotels in the final years of the 1980s, and massive relocations of the homeless population went into effect, she was not surprised to learn that almost all the people she had known within the Martinique were going to be moved to the South Bronx. Even those who put up some resistance against moving into neighborhoods where they knew their children would be isolated from good public schools and decent health facilities were made to understand that this decision was not in their hands. They would be shown apartments that the city had prepared for them. If they did not like what they were shown, they could of course refuse it and look elsewhere; but from that point on, as they were made to understand, they would be on their own.

  Alice tried a little harder than some of the others did to fight the city’s relocation plans. She studied lists of housing units in Manhattan and she walked the streets and spent entire days in tracking down the leads she’d found. After several weeks, she told me of a building she had seen on Second Avenue, not far from Bellevue Hospital, which, she was told, accepted federal housing subsidies like those that she and other mothers in the Martinique had finally received.

  There was, admittedly, more than a little wistful innocence in this attempt, and I suspect that at some level Alice knew she wasn’t going to win. And still, as spunky and determined as she was, there were a couple weeks in which I thought that she might pull it off. When she told me she had gone into the rental office of the building she had looked at and had learned that there would soon be vacancies, I started to believe that she might actually succeed.

  Her hopes, however, would be swiftly dashed.

  “ ‘I told my social worker where the building was, and asked her to put in my application,” she reported a week later. “She went in back to talk to someone else, and she was in there for a good long while. When she came out she said that she was very sorry but it wasn’t going to work.

  “ ‘You know, Mrs. Washington? They don’t seem to have no openings in that building for you now. But I think we’ve found a real nice place for you to live in the South Bronx.’ ”

  “What d
id you say?” I asked.

  “What could I say?” she said. “I knew she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. This was a black lady and we both knew what was in the other’s mind. So pretty soon, she says, they’re going to be takin’ some of us to see this building in the Bronx.

  “I guess I knew this thing was really settled in advance,” she said at last. “I gave it my best shot. It didn’t work. So, in another month or two, I’ll have to pack my stuff and tell the kids to pack their things. I think that we’ll be gone before December.”

  Alice’s prediction was only slightly premature. Soon after New Year’s—it was 1988 by now—she and her children were moved into a rat-infested building on a street called Boston Road, which intersected with East Tremont Avenue, not far from the block where Pietro and his children would be living before long.

  It was in that building, in the years that followed, that the friendship that had formed between us in the Martinique grew into a deeper bond that made it possible to talk with one another about our private lives and personal affairs without the sense of circumspection that we might have felt at first. We came to trust each other and to share our fears and worries with each other. (I had worries of my own—about my father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and my mother, who was frail and elderly.) For the most part, however, we simply had relaxed and pleasant times together during which we’d talk for hours about things that were entirely unrelated to the policies and politics and difficult conditions that surrounded her existence.

  Even when she needed to discuss with me something that was painful or laden with anxiety, she never lost the capability to look into the face of danger with a sense of dignity and, even at the hardest times, with a gift for finding ironies and pointing to comedic aspects of a situation that would likely not have held the slightest possibilities of humor for most other people that I knew. Anger at the big things, but laughter at the oddest details of the very small things—“an eye for incongruities” is the way I thought of it—enabled her repeatedly to rise above calamitous realities.

  – II –

  One winter evening, two years after she had left the Martinique, I walked up the hill from the station at East Tremont to the building where she lived, pressed the button by her name, listened for the lock to click, which always came too fast, waited for it to click again, and went inside and down two lengthy corridors to her apartment door.

  Alice was in an upbeat mood and, as often was the case when she was in good spirits, she took the greatest pleasure in talking about food.

  I asked her what she’d had to eat that day.

  “You know—what I always eat when I can afford to. My lamb chops and my baked potato, and my garlic bread. Did I tell you I enjoy a baked potato? All you have to do is put it under the cold water tap and pat it with a paper towel. Pat it light so, as it bakes, it don’t get dry. Then you rub some margarine or butter on the skin and wrap it up in foil. Wrap it up with butter, it comes out real nice. It looks like something you would get in a good restaurant.”

  “Do you use margarine or butter?”

  “Parkay is cheaper but I love the taste of butter,” she replied. “Try to get whipped butter. Breakstone’s is the best. I’m pretty sure that you can get it at your store. …”

  Instructive details about cooking different kinds of food became a routine part of almost every conversation we would have in the next year. “I cook my broccoli in a steamer,” she told me on another night, “so the broccoli stays green. Otherwise you boil away the minerals and vitamins. I do the same with butter beans and green peas. My mother taught me that.”

  She reported to me on a box of grapefruit I had ordered for her—one of those gift packages that are shipped directly to a person’s home from a company in Florida. “There was twelve big grapefruits in there. Ruby red. I had a half of one of them this morning with my raisin toast.

  “Jonathan, they’re good! There’s so much juice in there! You take it from the carton and you feel it with your hands. Even without sugar they’re so sweet!”

  Her conversations about food were intermingled frequently with her affection for her mother and her memories of families she grew up with in a neighborhood where many Jewish people still were living at the time.

  “Do you like smoked salmon?” she inquired.

  “I love it,” I replied.

  “Me too,” she said. “My children say that I could live on bagels and smoked salmon.”

  “How did you get a taste for that?” I asked.

  “From my mother,” she replied.

  She told me that they lived above a Jewish store when she was young—“a delicatessen and a restaurant combined,”—and she said she also had known Jewish girls at school.

  “What do you call the soup that Jewish people make from beets?”

  “Borscht,” I said.

  “That’s it. My mother made me taste it once. I didn’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I admitted.

  “They say it’s not too bad with sour cream,” she said, as if she was trying to persuade herself to reconsider it.

  Her mother’s liking for Jewish foods seemed to be associated for her in a reassuring way with the friendships she had had not only with her Jewish classmates but with older Jewish people—“elderly people,” Alice said, whom she liked to talk to when she was a child.

  She told me that her mother had an office job with an interracial group in the 1960s in a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was then, and is today, a beehive of religious activism. Between her mother’s friends at work and her own friends at school, she had had a lot more contact with white people in that era than she and her children did today. I knew she was nostalgic for those days.

  One night, maybe six or eight weeks later when I was there for dinner, Alice became irritated with herself because she had forgotten to put glasses on the table.

  She asked me what I’d like to drink: “Tonic or iced tea?”

  She still called soda “tonic,” as my mother did.

  I asked what kind she had and she replied, “Cream soda.”

  I told her that I hadn’t seen a bottle of cream soda since I was a child fifty years before.

  “Where do you get it?”

  “At the store,” she said. “I’m sure they have it up there where you live.” She poured it into a glass with ice, poured herself a glass as well, and came back to the table.

  We had a nice dinner, with baked apples for dessert. After we had eaten, she held her hands around a cup of coffee and a smile slowly came across her face.

  “How’s that little friend of yours who had a little baby?”

  I was surprised that she remembered her: a young woman who was helping me in the preceding winter and who called her three or four times when I was away from home.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “What does she look like?”

  “She’s got freckles,” I replied, “and long red hair.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”

  “She sounded very young,” she said. “Her baby never would stop crying!”

  “She was teething then, I think.”

  “I told her what to do.”

  After an authoritative pause, she made this observation: “She was very formal on the phone with me at first. She wouldn’t call me anything but ‘Mrs. Washington.’ I told her, ‘How come I can call you by your first name but you won’t use mine?’ ”

  “I think that she was shy.”

  “I thought so, too. I told her I was no one to be scared of. ‘I’m a mother just like you,’ I said. ‘From this point on, you call me by my first name or you don’t call me at all. We either talk like friends or we don’t talk.’ ”

  She got to
know a number of my friends over the years and frequently made observations to me later in regard to a peculiar awkwardness in one, a sense of insecurity or sadness in another—or, in one case I remember from the year before, an overeagerness to please. I often thought she could have been a therapist because she was so gifted at unpeeling superficial explanations, which she did sometimes by teasing people slightly, but her teasing almost always had a playfulness about it.

  She was, however, not reluctant to give strong advice when she thought that someone needed it. She reproached me many times when I grew impatient with my mother, who often drove me to distraction by complaining to me of the problems that my father caused her, because of his increasing loss of memory. “You’re going to lose her someday. When you do, it will torment you to remember anything unkind you ever said to her. You’ve been blessed that she’s still here. My mother died when she was forty-six. I would have given anything to have my mother with me still. Remember what I’m saying.”

  Friends can give advice like this, intending well but doing harm. Sometimes they don’t realize that the kinds of words they use, and the tone that they assume, can be crippling to you; sometimes perhaps they do. Alice was different in this sense. She understood a lot about fragility in people that she cared for. Even when she grew impatient with mistakes she thought her friends were making, she never showed the slightest wish to demonstrate her competence at the cost of someone else’s self-respect. This was one of the qualities in Alice for which, in time, I came to be most grateful.

  Dinner with Alice: 1992.

  She had not been feeling well. She said that she’d had very little appetite the week before and couldn’t get herself to eat and didn’t have much energy. She said she’d seen her doctor, who told her she was running a low fever—a problem that, she mentioned passingly, she’d had several times that year. But tonight she felt much better and she said she wasn’t tired, so I stayed there late.

  After coffee and dessert she lit a menthol cigarette. She had started smoking “a lot more than I should,” she said, while she was in the Martinique. “Three packs a day”—far more than she’d ever smoked before. “It was the goddamn tension there. You could cut it with a knife. It seemed like almost everyone was smoking. If they couldn’t buy a pack, they’d bum a couple cigarettes from someone on their floor.”