Fire in the Ashes

“I used to wonder what enduring influence all of this would have upon the capacity of children in the building to believe in any kind of elemental decency in people who have power over their existence.” 

Kozol witnessed the horrors of the Martinique Hotel. The adults who ran the hotel were negligent, and the children lived in a state of deprivation and chaos. They often went hungry and were cold and sick, while their parents slid into a state of deep despair. The city authorities looked the other way, and the building became rife with drug users. Kozol imagines that the abuse and chaos surrounding the children of the Martinique would wind up harming them, and this book is his attempt to figure how the children who were once housed in the Martinique fared as they aged. 

“The city, wrote the columnist Bob Herbert, who was then a writer for the Daily news, ‘takes one child out of [his] care and then hands him over 1,000 more.’” 

The day-to day administrator of a shelter called the Prince George Hotel on West 28th Street in Manhattan was convicted of having abused his own daughter. He locked her in the house, beat her, and deprived her of food. He was nonetheless allowed to supervise the welfare of over 1,200 other children at the Prince George, showing the careless disregard of city bureaucracy towards the homeless at the time.  

“If you ever see me get my needles out again, you’ll know I’m feelin’ happy.” 

Vicky was very depressed when living in the South Bronx. Always emotionally vulnerable, she was dating an abusive man. Later, when she resettled in Montana, she took up knitting for a time, when she was feeling better. However, she eventually fell prey to drinking, in reaction to the struggles of her son, Eric. 

“She reached out her hand in the direction of the roses but it seemed she didn’t dare touch them.”

Vicky saw a woman selling flowers in the subway station but didn’t allow herself to even touch them until Kozol offered to buy her one. She purchased a rose and held it to her chest while walking to St. Ann’s. It was as if Vicky did not feel that she was entitled to the good things in life, no matter how simple. 

“But positive thinking, as highly recommended as it is, can be overrated as a salutary and sufficient answer to calamitous conditions that are far beyond the power of an individual to alter or control in more than small degrees.” 

Vicky tried to think positive thoughts while she was living in Montana, but Kozol makes the point that positive thinking cannot make up for the history she and her children had. Vicky’s mother died when Vicky was 5, and she had long struggled with mental illness. Thinking positively could not help her son, Eric, who had his own struggles and who fell into criminality and later killed himself when they were living in Montana.

“For all the defensive toughness and aloofness others saw in him, he had spoken to his mother in that moment in the way that frightened children do.” 

Right before he killed himself, Eric told his mother, Vicky, that he needed help and did not feel good. If he had confessed his feelings earlier, he might have been able to get help, Kozol thinks. Though Eric acted tough, he had a deep well of vulnerability and sadness underneath that he kept well covered until he appeared childlike and helpless just before his call for help and his death.

“Walking back along a street we didn’t take before, we passed another vacant lot, surrounded by a wire fence, in which another patch of flowers was in bloom. The children tried in vain to reach them through the spaces in the fence.” 

When Kozol was walking with Pietro’s children and their friends in the South Bronx, the children tried in vain to reach flowers, but they were out of reach. The children cannot reach the beauties of life, such as flowers, that are easily within reach for more privileged children.

“‘I know,’ he said, ‘it seems a little crazy for us to keep a duck in the apartment. But the children love him, and the neighborhood is so depressing and they have so little. I just want them to remember they’re children.”

Pietro kept a duck in his Bronx apartment, even though the welfare worker did not allow such luxuries, in an attempt to give his children something playful and fun. His children did not have the privileges of other children, and so Pietro wanted them to have an element of childish fun. However, the welfare worker made the family “evict” the duck, Oscar, once it was discovered that they were sheltering it. 

“Christopher was the white boy. He did this in New York. Eric was the black guy. He did it in Montana. One with a needle. One with a shotgun. The differences are there.”

Kozol draws parallels between Eric, an African-American man in Montana who killed himself with a shotgun, and Christopher, a white man who overdosed from heroin in New York City. Though they were superficially different, they had both suffered from growing up in the Martinique and the South Bronx, and their traumatic childhoods left them scarred. 

“Traumatizing is too nice and too genteel. It was a nightmare. It was hell on earth.”

Ariella Patterson describes the Martinique as beyond traumatizing. The families there lived in deprivation and peril. The elevators did not even work, and some mothers turned to sleeping with the guards so they could get protection. 

“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.”

Alice Washington had an acute sense of the ironies in political and journalistic language. It was she who pointed out to Kozol that the newspapers and bureaucrats referred to homeless people using terminology that would have been used to refer to refuse. Rather than being referred to as human, they were likened to sewage backing up in plumbing, showing the way others regarded them as less than human.

“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.”

Though Alice Washington was a formerly homeless woman who had been infected with HIV and died of a form of lung cancer, Kozol refuses to think of her as a victim. She was instead a bright, observant woman with a good sense of the absurd. She was also someone with decided tastes in food that helped define her and give her individuality.

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

When Kozol toured the South Bronx with Leonardo when the boy was not even 7 years old, Leonardo told him that bodies were being burned in a nearby building. Kozol found that that Leonardo was right: the building was a medical incinerator that was burning parts of bodies and other medical waste. The toxic fumes that the incinerator emitted were worsening the asthma of Leonardo and other people in the Bronx.

“‘Jonathan,’ she said, ‘I know that you get sad sometimes. I can tell when you come in.’ She put her hands on top of one of mine. ‘But you don’t always need to dress in black…’”

Pineapple, whom Kozol meets when she is in kindergarten, is always irrepressible. Though she lives in a decrepit building and attends a chaotic school, she has a maturity that is well beyond her years. As time goes on, she takes care of Kozol and looks out for him as much as he looks out for her. He appreciates her buoyancy no matter what stands in her way.

“‘De Soto stole the Indians’ gold, but Cortez stole my people’s soul.’”

Mosquito, Pineapple’s sister, has a mature sense of history. Even when she was in third grade, she had a deep understanding of the way in which Latinos (her parents were from Guatemala) had been affected by European domination. However, the books at her school did not give her this information. She came to it on her own, showing wisdom and maturity well beyond her years.

“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.” 

Kozol writes that Pineapple’s father, Virgilio, always tried to connect his children to Guatemala, where he was born. Though these efforts were largely symbolic, they show his connection to his children. However, some people in Rhode Island misguidedly criticized Virgilio when a problem with his green card forced him to return to Guatemala. Others criticized his neglect of his children, but he was in actuality a dedicated and caring father.

“‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I understand that you are an author. I, too, am a novelist.’”

This is how the intellectual Jeremy introduced himself to Kozol when he was only 12 years old. He loved books and writing, even though the schools and teachers around him in the Bronx did not often encourage him. As he moved in middle school, he was discouraged from following his intellectual inclinations, and Kozol helped Jeremy attend a private school in New England that encouraged his love of learning. 

“And we had a speaker here. Someone that you know. His name was Robert Coles. Dr. Coles, I ought to say. I saw a sadness in his eyes. I went up to speak with him.” 

Jeremy met the famous writer and educator Robert Coles at his private school. Kozol was perceptive enough to notice that Coles seemed to carry a sadness about him. Ever inquisitive, Jeremy went up to Coles to speak with him.

“Jeremy asked the little boy if he knew Mr. Rogers’ song about the ‘neighborhood.’ The child said he did. So Jeremy leaned across the table to the boy and hummed the song, inviting him to sing. He didn’t have the strength to sing so Jeremy sang the words instead. The child smiled and tried to sing the final words himself.” 

Here, Jeremy visits a boy with HIV. His singing of the song was an attempt to give this sick boy some hope and a sense of being a child. Jeremy intuitively understood how the boy was suffering and how to connect with the boy. Jeremy later worked at St. Ann’s and showed this same sensitivity to the families he came into contact with. 

“Sometimes, when he told me of his feelings of perplexity about a goal he thought he was about to reach but which once again had slipped away from him, I found that I was thinking of a child’s toy, a little boat without an anchor, spinning in a circle as the currents drew it off in one direction and then pulled it in another.”

Kozol writes about the way in which Angelo found himself defeated continually. Even as an adult, he felt as confused as a child about how others succeeded when he had not. He struggled in school, and he never received the help he needed. 

“‘The sun came out while I was looking at the photo. The light from the sun passed across his face. I remember hoping that he was in peace, but I also felt relief that I wouldn’t have to see him on that corner anymore.” 

Here, Benjamin recalls the time when he has to identify the body of his brother, Edward, from a photograph. Edward had been an addict. After Edward died, Benjamin struggled with feelings of guilt for having been spared the same fate.

“But, in the long run, Benjamin’s recovery depended on his own ability to dig out of the nightmare of his early years and see enough potential value in himself to turn his back upon the past, look hard at the present crisis he was in, and then begin to shape a set of goals that would give some meaning to the future.” 

With Martha’s love and determination to help him, Benjamin was able to recover from his traumatic past. He sought help for addiction, which had killed his brother, and he found an inner sense of strength and resolve to improve his life.

“Children in the inner cities, we are told, must be ‘held accountable’ for their success or failure. But none of these children can be held accountable for choosing where they had been born or their childhood.” 

In the Epilogue, Kozol challenges the idea that children should be held accountable for factors beyond their control. Children are not responsible for having been born into traumatic situations and cannot be held accountable for the situations that make it hard for them to thrive.