Fire in the Ashes

Jeremy began his studies at college and wrote a paper about what it had been like for him to have been labeled a deviant and placed in isolation at his public high school. He had uneven grades, and he tended to develop ailments when his work was due. After taking summer classes to make up failed work, he began his sophomore year.

He continued to study and decided on majoring in English. Though he had an embarrassing incident with a girl he liked, he continued to show good humor and a rambling intellectual interest in many subjects. When it came time for him to pass his comprehensive exams, he went into high gear. He recalled that very few students in his building in the Bronx, perhaps one-half to two-thirds, hadn’t even graduated from high school. He knew some who had dropped out of college, and he knew very few who had graduated on time. He wanted to please his mother and be among those select few. In the end, he avoided mishaps and passed all his exams.

After graduation, he wanted to be a teacher, and he was gifted at working with the children who came to St. Ann’s. He wasn’t certified, though, so he began working for a private company that helped students pass the standardized tests he himself hated. He took his mother to Boston, to visit with Kozol. Jeremy entered a teacher-training program but found that it was over his head, and though he still wanted to be a writer and still loved the theatre, he couldn’t quite figure out a way forward. Martha, the pastor at St. Ann’s, made him a teacher in the afterschool program at the church, and then the manager of her office. He grew into the role and was good at handling the crises that popped up; Martha praised his pastoral abilities. He still did not know quite where his journey would take him but was happy on the path forward.

Kozol profiles a boy named Angelo, whom he met when Angelo was a mischievous 7-year-old with a tendency to ask probing questions about God. When Angelo met Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers Neighborhood fame) at St. Ann’s, Angelo kissed him on the face. Angelo did well in elementary school, but began to be a fighter in middle school, when other kids threatened him. His mother moved to Spanish Harlem, where Angelo continued to get into trouble. He was then transferred to a school that was woefully understaffed and underserved. The principal spoke movingly to Angelo about his own troubles and his eventual return to school after dropping out, but Angelo still struggled with a temper. He had been expelled from one school and suspended from another, so he couldn’t switch out of this low-quality school.

Kozol calls middle school the “killing fields,” academically and psychologically, for so many kids in poor neighborhoods. They can’t recover from their poor schooling to be successful in high school, and Angelo failed so many classes in 9th and 10th grade that he was not promoted to his junior year. Instead, he dropped out of school.

When Angelo moved back to the Bronx, he caught up with Kozol and told him he’d been in trouble with the law and sent to the Tombs (the Manhattan Detention Complex, a municipal jail) about a dozen times. However, most of what Angelo had done was not violent. Instead, he was arrested for things like hopping turnstiles or defending a friend in a fight and getting picked up by the police. He kept talking about returning to school, but he’d often wind up considering programs that were essentially shams. Kozol recalled that Angelo had had to repeat first grade, and he still retained confusion about how to move ahead in school.

Angelo then made a disastrous mistake by entering a store with a friend who was dealing drugs and was caught in a sting operation. He was sent to Rikers and was given a sentence of time served and several years of probation. While there, he passed several of his GED subject exams. His mother had remarried and given birth to twins: a girl named Violeta and a boy named Timothy. Her husband was older, and Angelo in effect became the twins’ father, getting them up for school, meeting them after school, and often putting them to bed. He also worked part-time in a restaurant during the day.

Angelo saw a woman he had known when younger and who had managed to almost graduate from college. While he did not conceive of himself as successful, and while Kozol writes that others may not either, Angelo is a success story because he has managed to still be loving and decent. He did not have the advantages of children like Pineapple and Leonardo, as his mother could not intervene for him in school and his father was in prison. Still, he managed to grow up and remain kind.

This chapter is about Benjamin, Kozol’s godson. Kozol describes it as the hardest to write. Benjamin grew up in the Diego-Beekman houses, and his mother died when he was 12. Of her five children, only two are still alive. Benjamin’s oldest brother, who had been a drug dealer, was shot dead when Benjamin was 8. His other brother, Edward, was an addict who choked to death while in police custody. A third brother had been missing since his mother’s death and is presumed dead, while his sister, an addict and drug dealer, has spent more time in prison than out of it. Benjamin was raped by his brother Edward when he was 9.

When Benjamin’s mother was ill, he used to steal for her. He came often to Martha for help, and she made him an acolyte at the church. Benjamin’s mother asked Martha to care for him after she died. Benjamin’s father showed up, but it was clear he only wanted the apartment and did not care for his son, so Martha took Benjamin in.

Benjamin struggled with guilt and asked himself why he had been spared when his brother Edward had died, and he struggled to connect with the psychiatrists he was seeing. Martha was going through her own struggles, as the Latino man who had been temporary pastor of St. Ann’s opposed her taking over and tried to turn the congregation against her. Benjamin had meanwhile learned nothing at his school in the Bronx and could not read. Martha sent him to an innovative school called The Children’s Storefront in Harlem, started by poet Ned O’Gorman, but Benjamin still struggled academically and still stole from Martha. She sent him to a school with more discipline, but he was expelled. He struggled with addiction and was arrested and sent to the Tombs, where Martha let him stay for a few days before bailing him out.

Benjamin then decided to go to Odyssey House, an addiction treatment center, and look at himself honestly. He was in part inspired to do so by Martha’s own courageous battles at her church, and he then helped others through their own recovery. He enrolled his sister in the program, but she was expelled. He moved out of Martha’s apartment but still spoke with her several times a day. He studied in the mornings and helped people with their recovery at night, with a sense of calm and protectiveness in spite of all the death he had witnessed while very young.

Kozol writes about the way in which some of the children he profiles seemed to have been affected by factors behind the control of society. However, he writes that many factors are within the control of society, as they grew up in the Martinique and the South Bronx at a time when criminality was rampant. The children were not accountable for having been born into that time and place. Kozol writes that there is no way to know if the children who fell into self-destructive patterns would have done so under other circumstances, but there is no question that these children’s lives were affected by factors that went far beyond parental responsibility and personal “accountability.”

Kozol addresses the question of exceptionalism: why people like Pineapple, Jeremy, Leonardo, Pineapple’s sisters, and others were able to survive and to have adulthoods in which they can use their talents. Kozol points out that each of them were the beneficiaries of parents and mentors, including teachers, Martha, or organizations such as A Better Chance or Prep for Prep. But requiring this degree of chance for success is not a viable way to raise healthy children.

Kozol also addresses whether the South Bronx has changed since the children he profiles were growing up there. Some degree of early gentrification has taken place, though that process also poses the danger of displacing the poor who live there. However, Mott Haven is still the poorest neighborhood in the poorest congressional district in the nation. Unemployment is still very high in the area, and people turn to drug dealing to make money. The Diego-Beekman Houses, after an investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), have been cleaned up, but the area is still violent. The schools in the neighborhood lag well behind those in wealthier districts, and the charter schools that have sprung up tend to concentrate on educating students to take standardized tests.

Kozol maintains contact with Pineapple, whose brother had returned to Providence and is doing well. Pineapple had to contend with diabetes (and Kozol’s fund helped her with medical costs), but her sense of joyousness and good nature remained intact. Her sisters were also doing well, and she continued to promise to join Kozol in fighting for justice in the South Bronx once she and her sister had their degrees.