Jonathan Kozol - Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

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

ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS

THE SHAME OF THE NATION

LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER

Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Kozol

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kozol, Jonathan.
Fire in the ashes : twenty-five years among the poorest children in America / Jonathan Kozol.
p. cm.
1. Poor childrenUnited States. 2. Poor familiesUnited States. 3. Education of childrenUnited States. 4. ChildrenUnited StatesSocial conditions. I. Title.
HV741.K674 2012
362.7756909747275dc23 2012005183

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3595-0

Jacket design by Darren Haggar
Jacket photograph by Stephen Shames

v3.1

For Lisette and Angelo,
Pineapple and Jeremy,
Benjamin and Leonardo,
Lara and Mosquito,
Stephen and Miranda,
Antsy and Ariella.
And for Alice Washington.
They prevailed.

Over the course of many years I have been talking with a group of children in one of the poorest urban neighborhoods of the United States and have written several books about them and their families. Readers ask me frequently today if Ive kept in contact with the children and if I know how many have prevailed against the obstacles they faced and, in those cases, how they managed to survive and how they kept their spirits strong amidst the tough conditions that surrounded them.

It has not been difficult to keep in contact with most of these children because so many of them, as they have grown older, have come to be among my closest friends. They call me on the phone. They send me texts and e-mails. We get together with each other when we can.

In telling the stories theyve been sharing with me about the years since they were very young, I have begun by recapitulating moments in their childhood that set the scene for what their lives are like today. On some occasions, they have helped me to correct mistakes Ive made or misimpressions Ive conveyed in the writings that I did during those early years when we first met.

The names of the children, and grown-up children, and almost all the older adults Ive described are disguised to protect their privacy, and many have been given different pseudonyms from those Ive used before. Their exact ages, the locations of their homes, and other details of their lives have sometimes been disguised as well. Conversations on related topics are at times combined, and stories and events told to me out of order are resequenced. Further discussion of the way I wrote this book, and the ways that events and conversations have been edited, is provided in the text itself, as well as in the endnotes.

The stories in this book were brought to their conclusion in the weeks preceding January 2012. Many of the lives of children in these stories will, I expect, continue to take unforeseen and interesting directions. But this, for now, is where I must leave them. I hope the future will be kindly to them all.

Christmas Eve of 1985 was not a good time for poor women and their children to depend on public kindness or prophetic reenactments of the Christian gospel at the hands of civic and commercial leaders in New York. It was a time when opulence among the citys newly minted rich and super-rich was flaunted with an unaccustomed boldness in the face of New York Citys poor and homeless people, thousands of whom were packed into decrepit, drug-infested shelters, most of which were old hotels situated in the middle of Manhattan, some of which in decades past had been places of great elegance.

One of the largest shelters was the Martinique Hotel, across the street from Macys and one block from Fifth Avenue. In this building, 1,400 children and about 400 of their parents struggled to prevail within a miserable warren of bleak and squalid rooms that offered some, at least, protection from the cold of winter, although many rooms in which I visited with families in the last week of December were so poorly heated that the children huddled beneath blankets in the middle of the day and some wore mittens when they slept.

I remember placing calls on freezing nights from phone booths on Sixth Avenue or Broadway trying to reach Steven Banks, a Legal Aid attorney who performed innumerable rescue actions for the families in the Martinique that year. The wind that cut across the open space of Herald Square at night was fierce, the sidewalks felt like slabs of ice, and kids and parents from the Martinique who had to venture out for milk or bread or medicines would bundle up as best they could in layers of old clothes and coats, if they did have coats, or sweatshirts with the hoods drawn tight around their chins.

Dozens of kids I knew within the building suffered from chronic colds. Many were also racked by asthma and bronchitis. Infants suffered from diarrhea. Sleepless parents suffered from depression. Mothers wept in front of me.

I had never seen destitution like this in America before. Twenty years earlier, I had taught young children in the black community of Boston and had organized slum tenants there and lived within their neighborhood and had been in many homes where rats cohabited with children in their bedrooms. But sickness, squalor, and immiseration on the scale I was observing now were virtually unknown to me.

Almost every child that I came to know that winter in the Martinique was hungry. On repeated evenings when I went to interview a family I gave up asking questions when a boy or girl would eye the denim shoulder bag I used to carry, in which I often had an apple or some cookies or a box of raisins, and would give them what I had. Sometimes I would ask if I could look into the small refrigerators that the hotel had reluctantly provided to the families. Now and then Id find a loaf of bread or several slices of bologna or a slice or two of pizza that had gone uneaten from the day before. Often there was nothing but a shriveled piece of fruit, a couple of jars of apple sauce, a tin of peanut butter, sometimes not even that.

I continued visiting the Martinique throughout the next two years. During that time, a play about impoverished children of the nineteenth century in Paris, called Les Misrables, opened to acclaim in the theater district of New York. Some of the more enterprising children in the Martinique would walk the twelve or fifteen blocks between the hotel and the theater district in late afternoons or evenings to panhandle in the streets around the theater or in front of restaurants nearby. Homeless women did this too, as well as many of the homeless men, some alcoholics and some mentally unwell, who slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks and in doorways of the buildings in the area.

The presence of these homeless people was not welcomed by the theater owners. People were paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children of another era. The last thing that 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 front of them.