An Intimate Portrait of Society’s Outcasts By Lisa Fay

A review of Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years  Among the Poorest Children in America  by Jonathan Kozol, Crown Publishers, 368 pages,  $27

Jonathan Kozol’s latest book takes us back to some of the children he met  in the South Bronx over the past 25 years and concludes that some make it, , others don’t and most drift along in life.

He first meets these children and their parents in the Martinque  Hotel, one of the most notorious shelter hotels which was eventually shut down in 1989.

Kozol describes that during that time a play about impoverished children in nineteenth century Paris Les Miserables opened to critical acclaim in the theater district in New York. Children from the Martinique would panhandle around the theater. The theater owners did not welcome this behavior from these children. “People were paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children of another era. The last thing they wanted was to come out of the theater at the end and be obliged to see real children begging on the sidewalk right in from of them.”

Local businesses hired private guards and police developed strategies “cleanout “ the homeless around the theaters. Ironically, other business leaders employed people in the homeless population to drive out other homeless people from Grand Central Station.

Shelter families then moved to the South Bronx where they suffer deplorable housing conditions and bad schools. The Diego- Beekman buildings in Mott Haven section the South Bronx were owned by the same slumlord philanthropist, Gerald Shuster who owns the Continental Wingate properties in the Fenway.   The South Bronx tenants endure broken elevators, pollution, rats coming out of cupboards, garbage and sewage pileup, drug dealing, gangs, prostitution, broken locks and lack of security. Rather than make repairs and/or renovate the properties to make them livable, Shuster opts to sell these Diego-Beekman buildings. 

Over the years, I have heard that Wingate have been reluctant to make repairs and/or renovations to their Fenway properties.  As one former Continental Wingate tenant told me, “I’ve screamed enough. Let somebody else scream.”

Public education used to be the greater equalizer for families of all incomes like it was in the 1960s. No longer can a banker and a tree landscaper live on the same street like it happened when I was growing up. Nowadays, property values and SAT scores determine the quality of public education. Before, public education was a shared value among all of us. Nowadays so much depends upon the parents.  Nowadays, lack of income means inferiority even if a one or both parents is working full-time. No longer can public education be an equalizer for students of all incomes, regardless of their origin of birth. People are staying poorer longer not due to lack of efforts, but systematic policies which favor the rich and stigmatize poor people.

However, public education for these city kids fare no better. The schools are dirty and overcrowded. Students do not have enough textbooks and cannot take them home. Many teachers quit during their school year. Outbursts of violence are common. Learning is minimal, if that. One boy called Benjamin referred this time his” killing” years.

Kozol adds that boys have a harder time than girls. He reports on three boys: Christopher dies of a drug overdose, Silvio dies from a train accident, and Eric dies from self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head. All three has substantial supervision and caring to substitute for any lack of parenting.

Furthermore, 72% of black males entering ninth grade either did not graduate or did not complete academic requirements for graduation, according  to a 2010 report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

The girls, however, fare better in these bleak circumstances. Kozol has a wellspring of affection for Pineapple and her family. He recounts that Pineapple’s family has emotional stability and closeness that any child would kill for. He meets  with Pineapple’s mother after a party and these are his impression ‘

….when I thought back on that evening in Pineapple’s home, was the recognition I had gained of the energy and joyfulness and collective reinforcement of her sense of affirmative that she was receiving was the recognition I gained of the energy and joyfulness that  she was receiving from her parents and their relatives and their relatives. Amidst the grimness of the building and the neighborhood around them, her mother and father had created in their home an island of emotional security and warm congeniality that any child, rich or poor, would probably have envied. I hoped that this would prove to be a bedrock of stability from which she’d be able to pursue the opportunities that were now about to open up before her. “

 He also states that family also has loyalty and emotional connection that nurtures the family through hard times. Their father is deported back to Guatemala because the government determines that  he is an illegal alien. Pineapple tells Kozol that while they were living in the Bronx that their father periodically went back to Guatemala  because “he needed to check up on a house that still belongs to us. “ Every time one of the children had been born, she said, he would scrape together all the money that he had to buy them each a plot of land adjacent to the house, “so each of us would know we had a little piece of something of our own. Something to connect us… So, if we ever wanted, we would have a place to return to.”

But the soft soul in Pineapple’s case at least-an ever present recognition of her vulnerable status as a student, a quiet understanding of her family’s ultimate dependence  on the loyalty, and the continuity of loyalty, of those in Rhode Island who had been from the start in the role of their defenders- this, along with the inherent tenderness of character, easily wounded sensibilities, emotions that were far more fragile than she would allow the world to see, were always there, were always there, as she would confide to me a little later on, just beneath the surface of audacity.”

Kozol also relies on the caring of Alice Washington to help him get over the deaths of his two parents, both of whom lived to be 102 years old.

He emphasized that those who succeeded in college, such as Jeremy, Pineapple and her sisters, and Tabitha had major intervention. “The point that I need to emphasize is that all these children had unusual advantages. Someone intervened in every case, and with dramatic consequences……

“All of this, however, depends upon the charitable inclinations of a school or philanthropic donors and charity has never been a substitute, not in any amplitude for systematic justice and systematic justice in public education.”  Kozol  goes on to say… it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity  but that the public schools themselves in neighborhoods of widespread destitution ought to have the rich resources, small classes, and well-prepared and well-rewarded teachers that would enable us to give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of a careful selectivity  or by catching the attention of empathetic  people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up whom they meet by chance. Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy.”  

Success takes wide variety of forms. Again, boys have a more difficult time.  Angelo did not have the opportunities that Jeremy and Pineapple received. He was not exposed to books and ideas and did not have the parental backing that Pineapple could depend upon.

“But seven sessions in the Tombs and four months of Rikers Island have not destroyed the qualities of decency and earnestness, and persistence innocence- that “real light in his eyes” that Mr. Rogers noted when he took the photograph of Angelo that now hangs here on my wall. He isn’t slick. He isn’t glib.  He isn’t mean. He’s a kind and loving human being, which is not the case with many of the more sophisticated people that I know who have been to college or have multiple degrees. To me, those qualities of elemental goodness in his soul matter more than anything. “

The author reassured Angelo that considering “the disappointments and years of misdirection that he had undergone, I told him, that his own achievements were impressive, too. I said I thought he should be proud of the calm and steady life he was leading now. I hope that he believed me.”

Angelo works part-time in a restaurant and cares for his twin siblings. “It was only after he came home from Riker Island…..that he began to stabilize his state of mind enough to take a healthy and constructive role within the children’s lives”

It is easy to miss just how extraordinary lifesaving these words of encouragement are. Society must take people from where they began in how far they have travelled. For some people, they cannot make up ground in order to keep up with their peers. Therefore, these individuals must seek suitable alternative avenues to achievable skills. Therefore, American society needs to equate vocational training is as important as academic training, that vocational success is as worthy and necessary as academic success.

This is what happened to me, although differently.  I applied to study creative writing at Boston University.  Leslie Epstein, the director, turned me down, saying to it would be too difficult for me.  Upon reflection, he was right. Getting my undergraduate degree was hard enough and trying for a master’s would be too much for me, even with adaption   and accommodations.   Furthermore, Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission refused to pay for any more advanced education for me.

These rejections led me to spread my wings elsewhere. I needed a slower-paced environment in order to improve my writing and artistic skills. I attended lectures, meetings, classes, workshops,   conferences, art receptions, art exhibitions, and movies all over town. The Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline adult education centers were extremely welcoming to me.  The Brookline Art Center also offered their classes to me. The Joiner Center Writing Workshops, the Jefferson Park Writing Center, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center accepted me into their programs.  My Fenway neighbors invited me to submit pieces for the Fenway News, as well as become a board member to the Fenway Community Development Corporation.

I joined the Boston Writer’s Union and the Womens’ National Book Association.  I am presently involved with the Fenway Cultural District attending meetings and functions. I am on a Fenway  CDC  committee and helping to come up with ideas for a community center. It is fair to say I found my niche.

When I told a woman at a Mass Art reception that I didn’t have an advanced degree, she made me feel better when she said with her hands shaped like a book, “It is all in books.” It is fair to say that I have found my niche.

It is interesting that Kozol mentions that Jeremy is caught between rock and a hard place He loves writing and theater but cannot support himself with those choices. He tries his hand at teaching certification and finds the process overwhelming and he quits.  Kozol   reassures  him telling him about the aides who have worked with him completely his books that “they still were looking for that moment when their goals and longings, inchoate and disparate as they appeared to be, came together all at once-frequently in unexpected ways.”

Kozol adds that with the Reverend Martha help, …”he needed  a sense of being “centered” at this moment in life, no matter what direction he might later go. And she was wise and practical enough to find a way by which to make this possible.”

Reverend Martha directed Jeremy to be office manager at St. Ann’s Church where his sense of character and his knack for theatrics come into play.

Kozol gives his godson, Benjamin his due.  They share the same birthday, September 5. It is fair to say that he had a rough childhood with an absent father, a dying mother, a brother disappeared and presumed dead, another drug dealer brother murdered, a third brother choked to death, and a drug-addicted sister  who has spent more time in prison than on the outside.  

After testing Reverend Martha many years, getting into trouble with drugs, Benjamin finally entered Odyssey House and is in continual recovery. He counsels other drug addicts. Kozol   beams,  

“…. the call to service that he feels and the sense of calm that he can bring to others, and now to himself, have given him the kind of dignity that elevates his life far above the level of obsession with his own concerns at the cost of those around him.”

While Kozol  is tossed between whether things have improved when he knows full well, that things have gotten dramatically worse. He lets his students be the judge.

Pineapple and Kozol have a chat in which she acknowledges that while a black president is elected, that systematic changes are necessary. She notes that he didn’t go to bad schools and live in deplorable conditions.

She adds, “We understand there needs to be a whole lot of improvement. But for that to happen, other things, bigger things would have to happen first. The entire attitude of white superiority would have to be attacked. You would have to start from scratch.”

The author makes it clear that even though artists and photographers are moving into the gentrified Mott Haven, their kids are not going to the local schools. One of his former students tells him, “Do you see any white faces?”

While Kozol did not achieve systematic changes that he has hoped for in education and housing, he has received a few victories from certain students that have achieved success in varying degrees.

 His final message for this book came from a talk at Lesley University, “ Life goes so fast. Use it well. “

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