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

by Jonathan Kozol

  “Don’t make me laugh! It hurts too much,” she said, holding her hand against her chest; but she kept on laughing. That was nearly the last thing Alice ever said to me. I flew back to Boston the next day to be with my mother. The next time I returned to the South Bronx, it was for the funeral.

  There is more that I could say. The funeral was in the Bronx. The burial was in New Jersey. At the graveside, Martha spoke the final prayers. Alice’s son, whom I had known since he was in the Martinique and who was a young man in his twenties now, and her daughters and a number of her oldest friends were present at the end.

  I have not spoken of her children in this story. I never knew her daughters well. They were nearly adults when they left the Martinique and had subsequently married and had children of their own, so they were seldom present when I visited her home. I was closer to her son, who was nearly sixteen when they moved into the Bronx. He was a good student and completed high school and had an opportunity to go on to college but, despite his mother’s urging and my own, decided not to do so. For a while it appeared that he was drifting. But, within a year or so, he seemed to pull himself together, found himself a decent job, and stuck with it through a series of promotions. He went on to lead a relatively stable life. He’s a gentle person, and he seems to be at peace within himself.

  But it is Alice herself, not her children, not her friends or any other people who’d been kind to her and cared for her, and would deeply mourn for her, whom I want to celebrate. It is the qualities of character and personality that she had revealed to me from the first time that we met, and much more so as we became closer—the courage that she took from small encounters with the odd particularities of life, the vitality of anger and the outrage at injustice that afforded her an outlet for the strong emotions other people in her situation tended to turn in upon themselves in ways that damaged them tremendously—it is these qualities, as well as the generosity of spirit she displayed to me when I was going through some hard times of my own, that render her unique among the men and women I had come to know during their years of homelessness.

  When I remember Alice Washington today, I do not think about her as a victim of societal unkindness or as one of many women I encountered in those years who were stricken down by illnesses like HIV and cancer well before their time. Victimhood is not the word that comes to mind. A taste for bagels and smoked salmon, and for garlic bread with butter, and for melons that are ripe (not the “sick” and “shriveled” kind) and the price of fresh tomatoes come to mind. The flavor of cream soda comes to mind.

  She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended.

  PART TWO

  A Bright Shining Light

  CHAPTER 6

  Survivors

  These are the children of hope.

  These are the survivors.

  There are many of them.

  For some of the sweetest children that I knew, who found themselves drawn into trouble by the age of ten or twelve and fell into “the life of the streets,” as Ariella spoke of it, while in their teenage years, their victories consisted in the fortitude with which they turned their backs upon that life and the dangers that it held. As limited as this victory may seem to some, it was not a small one to their families and the other people in the neighborhood who loved them.

  For others, who steered clear of trouble but were drifting for a time in apparent aimlessness after leaving high school, whether they’d completed their degrees or not, victory and vindication, even of a modest sort at first, depended on that moment, never easy to pin down in time, when the hunger for a sense of purpose and direction coincided with the gradual emergence of what theologians often term “a sense of calling,” whether it’s a call to service or the strong appeal of a particular vocation.

  Some of the kids whose lives have been most difficult are struggling still and have yet to find that place of inner peace in which they can start to shape a vision of contributive maturity. But the fact that they are searching for that vision and meanwhile have retained much of the earnestness and elemental kindness I saw in them as children—and do not put up a slick veneer of toughness to disguise their vulnerable feelings—lends them a quality of honesty and innocence that leaves me optimistic for the future.

  There are others, an impressively large number of the children who were active in the programs at St. Ann’s, who, almost from the time they entered adolescence, had started to perceive themselves as virtually unbounded in their academic goals and were looking to a future that encompassed colleges or universities. In some cases, they’d already set their sights upon professional careers. More than a few have fulfilled those aspirations. I will be speaking of these students too, at great length, and joyfully.

  But, even in the case of those who were most successful in their schooling, who went on to colleges and universities and completed their degrees, or will shortly do so, and who tell me that they have their eyes set firmly on vocations, even on specific jobs, I suspect that several will strike out in new directions that they can’t anticipate at the present time. That is one of many reason why these stories will remain unfinished. There will be no hyperbolic endings of the kind we find in unconvincing movies about instantaneous success for someone who climbed out of destitution to dazzle the commercial world before the age of twenty-five or thirty. Success within the lives of those I’ve known for all these years is as much a matter of their inward growth—in decency, in character—as of their outward victories. And, at the end, uncertainties remain. How could it be otherwise? They still have, as I dearly hope, the best part of their lives ahead of them.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Boy Who Ate a Giant Bag of Cookies While He Walked Me All Around the Neighborhood, and His Very Interesting Mom

  He liked cookies. He was not quite seven. His name was Leonardo. I met him on the first day I visited St. Ann’s.

  His mother had a meeting scheduled with the pastor at the time when I arrived, so Leonardo volunteered to take me for a walk to see the streets around the church.

  It was a warm day at the start of summer in 1993. He was wearing red sneakers, blue shorts, and a jersey with a picture of three gerbils on the front. He had a bag of cookies with him—very big, chocolate chip—and he kept on munching them and asking if I wanted one the whole time that we walked.

  At one point we passed a vacant lot and he pointed to the branches of a tree to which a number of stuffed animals had been attached.

  “Bears,” he said.

  But when I asked him why the bears were in the tree, he smiled at the animals but gave me no response.

  “Okay,” he said after we had walked a while. “I think we need to go up here.” We crossed the avenue and went up a long street, with the grimy buildings of Diego-Beekman on both sides, until we got to P.S. 65.

  Leonardo was a small boy, with soft brown hair and dark brown eyes. When he got scared at night he said, “I go in my mommy’s bed and crawl under the covers.” He was one of hundreds of young children in the area who had chronic asthma. So he stopped for a moment at the top of the hill and took out a small inhaler from his pocket, gave himself a few puffs, then seemed to be okay.

  As we turned right on Cypress, he pointed to a small black dog. “Hi, Princess!” Then, to me: “That’s Princess.” Then: “You see? We’re almost there.”

  After we had walked a block on Cypres
s, he asked me, “Do you want to go on Jackson Avenue?” I said it would be fine. When we got to Jackson he pointed to another street. “Do you want to go down there?”

  I said, “Okay.”

  He hesitated for a moment. “They’re burning bodies there. …”

  His mother had warned me before we left the church, “He does tell fibs,” so I asked if he was telling me the truth. He pretended that he didn’t hear. Instead, he munched another cookie and began to hum.

  “Come on. I’ll take you there. We have to go around this block.”

  As we approached the place where he insisted people had been “burning bodies”—it was on a street by the name of Locust Avenue—a sour, rancid-smelling odor, drifting from the partly open metal door of a peculiar-looking building with a blue gunmetal top, did become perceptible. When we stood outside the door, the odor became stronger.

  “You sure,” he asked, “that you don’t want a cookie?”

  I thanked him but declined.

  “I think I’ll have another one,” he said.

  A few moments later, he announced, “The day is coming when the world will be destroyed. Everyone is going to be burned to crispy cookies.”

  A car stopped to let us cross a busy street. He waved at the driver, who waved back.

  “We’re out of cookies,” he reported. “I ate a whole bag. …”

  When we got back to the church, Leonardo’s mother and the pastor told me that his story about “burning bodies” had not been a fib at all—or was only a slight exaggeration. The building that he’d shown me was, in fact, burning parts of bodies, among other objects, and the odor I had smelled when Leonardo and I stood outside was usually more powerful.

  As Martha would explain to me, the building was a medical incinerator, burning what are known as “red-bag products,” hospital waste, amputated limbs and embryos, hypodermic needles, and the like, which were brought here every day from fourteen New York hospitals. An attempt to build a comparable incinerator on the East Side of Manhattan had been halted when physicians and environmentalists cautioned people living in that area of carcinogenic and respiratory dangers it might pose for children. As a result, it was constructed here instead, within a few blocks of a neighborhood in which at least 6,000 children such as Leonardo were residing and could not escape its emanations. The burner, moreover, because of its high smokestacks, spewed its toxins to a wider population of approximately 40,000 people, virtually all them black or Hispanic families.

  “When it’s going full blast,” Leonardo’s mother told me, “the stench is really potent. I have to close my windows, but it gets to Leonardo anyway.”

  Parents in the neighborhood launched impassioned protests over a period of years, beginning at the time of its construction in 1991. But their pleadings were discredited by the influential New York Times, which supported the construction of the burner in their neighborhood and said that the resistance of the parents was “misguided.”

  Under the headline “wasteful protest in the bronx,” the paper ran an editorial that may have been decisive in the outcome of the question. “It would be a tragic mistake,” according to the Times, if “panicky fears” of those who led the protests were to halt this installation.

  “Medical wastes are not only unsightly but dangerous. No one wants them in a residential neighborhood.” The “only place for such a facility,” the editorial continued, was in “a zone” where construction of residential housing was “forbidden”—a puzzling assertion in view of the fact that Leonardo and I were only about five minutes from his home when we stood in front of the waste burner, but which the paper justified on the technicality that the burner had been built just across the border of an adjoining area, which, according to the zoning laws, had been adjudged to be “industrial.”

  Leonardo’s mother—her name was Anne, but people who enjoyed her feisty personality used to call her “Antsy”—was one of the parents in Mott Haven who had fought most fiercely in opposition to the medical incinerator and who was convinced that it would be harmful to the children in the neighborhood. Four years later, in 1995, hospitalizations for attacks of asthma in Mott Haven and in adjacent areas were fourteen times as high as on the East Side of Manhattan. By that time, the pediatric asthma rate in the community affected was, according to a pediatric specialist with whom I consulted, higher than in any other urban area of the United States.

  Even before the waste incinerator went into operation, asthma rates in Mott Haven and adjoining areas had been very high. One reason was believed to be the concentration of several other factors known to be injurious to a child’s respiration—truck depots, for example, in which eighteen-wheelers would be parked with engines idling, venting their exhaust into the air. Large bus depots added to the problem, as did the lack of proper sanitation and healthy ventilation in much of the housing in the neighborhood. Physicians who were treating asthmatic children in Mott Haven were troubled that the city now had added yet another source of toxins to the air these children had to breathe.

  The incinerator was at last shut down by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in 1997. A year later, under a consent decree, the Browning-Ferris Corporation, owner of the installation where 500 violations of environmental law and air-pollution law had been recorded, agreed to donate money so that children who had trouble breathing could attend an “asthma camp.”

  All of this, from Antsy’s point of view, was a classic instance of racism gone wild. But, for Leonardo, pulling out his asthma pump to take a puff or two or three when he began to wheeze, it had come to be a fairly normal part of his existence and, to all appearances, he did not let it slow him down or undermine the pleasure that he took in making observations that he may not always have intended to be quite as funny or alarming as they were.

  It was only at night, his mother said, that his wheezing grew severe enough for her to be concerned. During the day, his asthma pump and whatever other medication he was taking seemed to keep his asthma under fairly good control. And, with his whimsical and comic personality and his ease at making friends and his popularity among the children at St. Ann’s and at his public school, he struck me as a relatively happy little boy and one with whom I always found it fun to talk because, among his other virtues, he was never boring.

  He did get quite a lot of satisfaction out of making off-the-wall remarks, some of which I was convinced he must have known a grown-up would find startling. He told me once, when I met him on the street a block or two from where he lived, that somebody—“this man I saw”—had “buried another man back there,” gesturing behind him. “The man he buried was alive.”

  I asked him, “Did you try to dig him out?”

  “No!” he said. “It was too gross!” He told me he had asked the man, “ ‘Are you still alive?’ But he said no.”

  He left the story there and, as he often did after saying something that he purposely left incomplete, he began to hum. Then he continued walking in the way that he was heading.

  In the years that followed, I spent a lot of afternoons and evenings visiting at Leonardo’s home, which was on the fifth floor of one of those buildings, the Diego-Beekman Houses, that Ariella had described. His mother, Antsy, was one of the savvier and more politically acerbic parents in the neighborhood. A very smart and largely self-taught intellectual, it seemed that she had done a great deal of reading in her teenage years and throughout her twenties and had thoroughly immersed herself in some of the writings of prominent black authors who had captured the attention of the public in the last years of the 1960s. One evening in her home, she carefully explained to me the highly conscious strategies by which black and Hispanic people in the Bronx were isolated racially by New York’s city planners in the years when white folks who had previously lived there “started their stampede to get as far away from us as possible,” and she quoted from an essay of Jame
s Baldwin that I had long forgotten.

  Like Ariella, she had an investigative instinct and she knew a bit about the owner of her building—“lives in Massachusetts, your neck of the woods,” she said—and she had a barrel of well-justified complaints about the disrepair her landlord had allowed and told me of her battle “to keep the rats behind the walls” from “getting out into my kitchen area.”

  Her background, however, was very different from that of Ariella. She had grown up in the South and came to New York City with her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother was a nurse at Albert Einstein Medical School for twenty-seven years and lived, she said, in one of the nicer sections of the Bronx that hadn’t yet been totally abandoned by white people, although the trend was under way and the schools, as a result, had already started their decline. Her father, from whom her mother was divorced, had moved upstate to Syracuse and, having had some training in “concrete construction,” opened his own business and brought Antsy there to live with him so that she could go to a good high school in his neighborhood.

  She apparently did well in school, studied hard and graduated but, as she put it, “had no special interest in going on to college.” When I asked her why she didn’t want to go to college, she said that she’d been caught up in “the whole thing of the hippie era—‘Do your own thing,’ you know, Beatles music, Ram Dass, ‘wear a flower in your hair.’ ” Unfortunately, it led her, as it did so many others, into being careless about using drugs—“first,” she said, “just smoking weed, doing acid … whatever else was on the scene. … But then I started using coke,” which she called “a very bad mistake. …”

  At some point in her later twenties, she told me that she fell in love. “A good-looking man, who just happened to be deep into drug-dealing,” although she claims she didn’t know that at the time. Before she got to know him, she said she used to see him from the window of a bus. “He’d wave to me, and I’d wave back. He had salt-and-pepper hair. I thought I was very cool. But when it came to making judgments about men, I was as green as a turnip that fell off the truck. To me, he was the sweetest guy in the entire world.”