Fire in the Ashes

Kozol writes about a woman he had met at the Martinique named Victoria, or Vicky, and describes her as one of the gentlest people he knew. She had been housed at the nearby Prince George Hotel for five years, before she was at the Martinique. Suffering from depression and seizures, she was treated at a hospital on Roosevelt Island. Her husband, who had a degenerative disease, died shortly after she got out of the hospital. Her movement through the shelter system with her two kids gave her what she calls a “zombie-like condition.”

The Prince George was managed by a man who was later convicted of abusing his daughter. However, he was allowed to have 1,200 kids under his care. The kids in the building were at risk of fire, mainly caused by drug users cooking crack cocaine in their rooms.

Vicky’s daughter, Lisette, was 7 at the time and fared well, but her brother, Eric, was four years older and better able to understand what was going on around him. In 1993, the family moved to Mott Haven, the poorest neighborhood in the Bronx, which was the poorest borough of the city. They lived near an Episcopal Church called St. Ann’s, which was led by a priest named Martha Overall who had given up law to minister to the poor.

Kozol met up with Vicky in 1995, when Eric was 16 and not faring well at school, as his school was of low caliber and he attended school irregularly. His mother could not help him; she had left school during junior high to clean houses. She subsisted on $7,000 a year in welfare benefits and occasional cleaning work. She had a boyfriend who, though she had a restraining order, occasionally still visited her and who had abused her severely.

Kozol received a call from a doctor named Edwards in a small town in Montana. Edwards had read Kozol’s earlier book, Amazing Grace, and offered to host a family who wanted to move to Montana. Vicky decided to seize this opportunity and relocate her family to Montana, where Edwards and the local community set them up in a house and where she got a job at the local supermarket. At first, Vicky thrived there, with Dr. Edwards’s help, and she began working as a dietary aide at a home for the elderly. She also took up knitting again—a sign that she was happy. Lisette got into some minor trouble but generally did well at school, while Eric, failing, dropped out of high school and got in trouble by impregnating a local girl and then getting involved in a series of robberies. He was also abusive to his girlfriend, who was in love with him. Vicky, overcome by Eric’s problems and his troublesome friends, was evicted from her home. Though her friends helped to get her resettled, she began drinking again and, depressed, quit her job.

Eric continued to get in trouble and perhaps to deal drugs, and then, after making a call to his mother for help, he killed himself in her house. He had never shared with anyone his deep feelings of depression. Overcome by guilt, Vicky continued to drink heavily. Kozol had a hard time reaching her after that, but he learned in part through Edwards, who also suffered from guilt after Eric’s suicide, that Lisette had formed a relationship with a university student. She got pregnant but was still able to finish high school and attend college in South Carolina. She later called Kozol to tell him that at age 26, she was the mother of four and was about to finish her work to become a paralegal, while her husband was becoming a dentist. Her mother had died of pancreatic cancer and had come to live with her at the end of her life. Lisette vowed to give her kids a good life and promised to take Kozol to her mother’s grave if he came to visit her in South Carolina. 

Kozol introduces the reader to Pietro Locatello, a doorman and maintenance worker who had lost his wife when one of her lovers strangled her on the Coney Island beach. He fell apart after that and became homeless with his mother and three children: Christopher, who was 10 when Kozol met him at the Martinique; Ellie, who was five; and Miranda, who was four. Christopher, despite warnings from his father, panhandled around the Martinique to buy food and trinkets, some of which he gave to his sisters. A handsome boy with white-blonde hair and blue eyes, he was befriended by a man who came to the Martinique. The man bought Christopher gifts and took him for a weekend to Long Island without Pietro knowing where his son was. While Christopher was openly hostile towards his father, Pietro’s daughters were still trusting and affectionate.

Later, Pietro and his family were relocated to the impoverished East Tremont section of the Bronx, where he worked part time packing bags in a local grocery store. When Kozol went to visit them in the Bronx, the family had sheltered several cats and a live duck in their apartment. The welfare worker who came to their house lectured them about having cats while they struggled to feed themselves, but they hid the duck, Oscar, from her until she found it during a surprise visit and made the family give it away. Pietro felt the duck was something he could give his kids, who had so little.

Christopher continued to resist control, though he confided in his grandmother, who was blind to his faults. By this time, he had mostly dropped out of school and was several grade levels below an average student because of his interrupted schooling when his family was homeless. By the time he was 15, he had been in juvenile detention twice for stealing and stripping cars, and, after more legal entanglements, he went to the prison at Rikers Island. Meanwhile, Kozol sent Pietro money through the fund he had set up to send Miranda and her sister to Catholic school. Their father and grandmother largely kept them sheltered from the streets. When Christopher was released from Rikers, he was not chastened by his experience and tried, with other young men, to push a boy they did not know onto the subway tracks. Bystanders rescued the boy, but Christopher was sent to prison in upstate New York for the next seven years. He wrote Kozol letters asking for money or to intervene to help get his sentence reduced.

Without warning, Pietro was evicted from his apartment because the so-called Section 8 housing allowance he had been provided with was withheld without reason. Pietro and his mother moved into a room in the apartment of a friend, while Ellie, who was to be married a year later and who already had a baby, moved in with her future husband’s family. Miranda had to drop out of school before her senior year, and she found work raking leaves, working at Yankee Stadium, and later working at a bakery. She was subsequently trained and found work as a home health aide. She got pregnant with a man who was more of a friend, and she had a son and lived on welfare until she took a part-time job.

When Christopher came out of prison, he went to live with Miranda in her tiny apartment. Finally, he got a good job at a gym called Equinox in Manhattan, as he had bulked up in prison. However, he never helped Miranda with the rent. He then quit his job, but he had a lot of cash and was likely involved in illegal activity. Meanwhile, Miranda checked regularly on her father. Her grandmother had to move into a nursing home, as she began to show signs of having Alzheimer’s, and it was difficult for Pietro to live without his mother. Pietro continued to write Kozol, reminiscing about old times and sounding optimistic about his son. Christopher, however, tried to get a hold of his grandmother’s widow’s pension until his father put an end to it. Pietro began struggling with a degenerative disease that affected his bone structure and that caused weakness in his arms and legs. He later had to go to a hospice, suffered a stroke, and died a few months before his mother, without ever reconciling with his son. Christopher was involved with big-time drug dealing, though an outreach worker at an agency for former inmates allowed him to live in his apartment. It was there that Christopher overdosed on heroin and died. Kozol finds many similarities between Christopher and Eric, as they were both exposed to the horrors of the Martinique at impressionable ages and seemed to have lost their bearings and never regained them.