Jonathan Kozol - Ordinary Resurrections: Children In The Years Of Hope

Also by Jonathan Kozol

DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE

FREE SCHOOLS

THE NIGHT IS DARK AND I AM FAR FROM HOME

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

ON BEING A TEACHER

ILLITERATE AMERICA

RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN

SAVAGE INEQUALITIES

AMAZING GRACE

Copyright 2000 by Jonathan Kozol

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint A Lion in a Zoo from The Sweet and Sour Animal Book by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1994 by Ramona Bass and Arnold Rampersad, Administrators of the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland randomhousebooks.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kozol, Jonathan.
Ordinary resurrections : children in the years of hope / Jonathan Kozol.
1st ed.
p. cm.
1. ChildrenNew York (State)New YorkSocial conditions.
2. Mott Haven (New York, N.Y.)Social conditions. I. Title.
HQ792.U5 K69 2000
305.2309741dc21 99-059808

Ebook ISBN: 9780307815880

Cover design by Darren Haggar

Cover photographs: Granger Wootz/Blend Images/Corbis

rh_3.1_c0_r1

for my father, Harry Leo Kozol,
and my mother, Ruth Massel Kozol,

and for Martha Overall

Events in this book take place for the most part during 1997 and 1998. A few events slightly precede this period and a final chapter updates certain narratives into the spring of 1999.

The names of children and most grown-ups are disguised. Their ages, the precise locations of their homes, and other details of their lives have sometimes been disguised as well. Grown-ups, however, who fill public roles, including teachers in the public schools, are in most cases introduced by their real names.

The stories in this book are drawn from notes, informal journals, childrens recollections, and my own, and now and then, although not often, tape recordings of our conversations. Time sequences are sometimes changed, and conversations on related topics are at times combined. Other discussion of the way this book was written and the ways these conversations have been edited, as well as some discussion of constraints imposed by privacy considerations, are provided in the narrative, endnotes, and acknowledgments. Documentation for all matters that rely upon the public record is also included in the endnotes, which begin on .

B irds in the morning, Thomas Merton writes, ask God if it is time yet to begin the day. He speaks of the first chirps of the waking birds at dawn outside the windows of his hermitage. They begin to speak, he says, not with a fluent song but with an awakening question that is their state at dawn. They ask God if it is time for them to be. God, says Merton, answers yes. Then, one by one, they wake up to be birds.

Tabitha Brown is six years old in the first grade. Her teacher says that shes a dreamer. She sits there sometimes in her class in vague ambiguous delight as if her thoughts are in a sweeter land than ours.

She nearly dies of shyness when I come into her class and sit down at the table next to her. But after Ive been sitting with her for a while she gets up and brings a small container to the table and unclasps the top to show me that it holds two mealworms and a beetle, all of which have names. This ones Ashley. This ones Mary-Kate. And this one, she says, pointing to the beetle, is a boy and hes named Michael.

Her reading skills are just beginning to emerge, although it isnt clear how well she understands the words she reads. When I ask her questions she gives dreamy answers. I look at her and think of sleepy cats on windowsills complaining slightly if you try to interrupt their dreams. In a foolish mood one day I asked her if she had a tabby cat in her genetic line. She actually smiled when I said this and did not reject the notion out of hand. Maybe! she said, then seemed to find this funny and went off into a little gale of laughter that just rippled on the surface of her smile.

Sweetheart? her teacher says.

Tabitha looks up. The teacher bends over her chair and looks into her eyes, then opens her textbook to the proper page and centers it before her on the desk. Tabitha sits up erect and tries to concentrate.

The teacher is gentle with her. Its still morning in New York, and very early morning in this childs life. Good teachers dont approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. Theyre not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They dont yet know whats in the box. They dont know if its breakable.

Sweetheart? the teacher says again.

Hello? says Tabitha.

Hello! the teacher says right back at her.

Eleven oclock. The children line up at the door. Tabithas the last in line. One of the other children puts her arm around her shoulder as they wait to leave the room. The teacher watches her, then looks at me and smiles, and shakes her head.

Where are they going now? I ask.

Recess! she says. Then lunch.

It may be nearly lunchtime in the world but, for this pleasant little girl, it seems as though its only a few minutes after dawn. Her mind is yawning still. Soon enough shell brush the cobwebs from her eyes and take a clear look at the world of vowel sounds and subtrahends and partial products, and some bigger things that lie ahead, like state exams, but not just now.

The children file with their teacher to the stairwell. She asks one of the boys to hold the door, and then she starts to lead them down the stairs. Tabitha looks around and waves goodbye to me.

I follow after them.

This is a book about a group of children whom Ive come to know during their early years of life, not in the infant years but in the ones just after, when they start to go to school and start to poke around into the world and figure out what possibilities for hope and happiness it holds. Most of these children live within a section of the South Bronx called Mott Haven which, for much of the past decade, was the nations epicenter for the plague of pediatric and maternal AIDS and remains one of the centers of an epidemic of adult and pediatric asthma that has swept across the inner-city populations of our nation in these years.

Some of these stories take place at an elementary school called P.S. 30 and some other public schools nearby. Others take place at a church, St. Anns of Morrisania, which is Episcopalian and runs an afterschool for children in the neighborhood, including Tabitha and many of her friends from P.S. 30. All of these children are black or Hispanic. All are very poor; statistics tell us that they are the poorest children in New York. Some know hunger several times a month. Many have respiratory problems. Most have lost a relative or grown-up friend to AIDS. Some have previously lived in homeless shelters. A large number see their fathers only when they visit them in prison.