Fire in the Ashes (26 page)

“Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?” Jeremy asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Jesus wept,” he answered.

Jeremy spent his grade-school years at P.S. 30, whose principal, Miss Rosa, was something of a maverick in her progressive views but also ran a tight ship and was able to retain a good deal of continuity within a seasoned faculty. But the middle school he was attending at the time we met was one of those dismal places I’ve described that would have been shut down many years before if it had been serving a middle-class community. The principal, when I went to meet him, appeared to be annoyed when I asked him about Jeremy and, indeed, he told me that he couldn’t find him listed in his records. After he reluctantly went through his files once again, he seemed to remember who I meant.

“Is he the one with pimples?”

Jeremy was mild-mannered—he was not assertive in dealing with his peers—and he was bullied often by the more aggressive students at the school. The principal was not the sort to offer him protection. Then, too, Jeremy stood out from his classmates by reason of the fact that he was an introspective boy and, when he did speak out in class, tended to ask questions that his teachers found obscure—and would sometimes tell him so—which presented yet another opportunity for students to make fun of him.

“He’s not like any of the other kids you see around the neighborhood,” his older brother said. “He walks along the street buried in one of his books. He goes by these places where the dealers and their friends hang out on the corners. It’s like he’s in a different world.…” Jeremy’s brother was
seventeen by then and, even though he had not allowed himself to get involved with criminal activities, he was well acquainted with the ones who were.

“I tell them he’s my brother and I’ll deal with them myself if they ever lift a hand against him.”

But within another year Jeremy’s mother had become alarmed about the friends his brother had been making and sent him home to Puerto Rico to live with her family there. Jeremy no longer had a brother to protect him. He was beaten several times at school and, when his pleas for help were disregarded by his teachers and his principal, he started staying out of school for three or four days in a row.

This was no great loss to him in academic terms. And, in a kind of prideful indignation, he compensated for his poor attendance by seeking out well-educated mentors who gravitated to St. Ann’s and, in particular, a Puerto Rican poet living in the neighborhood who welcomed him into his home and talked with him for hours at a time about the books that lined his wall, immersing him in conversations about Greek and Roman history and reading him some of the famous British authors—John Milton, for example—and others he revered.

After I’d become acquainted with the poet, a distinguished-looking man named Juan Bautista Castro, Jeremy and I spent many evenings with him at his home. At the poet’s urging, I began suggesting books to Jeremy that I thought he might enjoy, but the titles I suggested (“young adult books,” as they’re called) did not seem to interest him, or else he’d tell me he’d already read them when he was in elementary school. When I asked him what he liked, he spoke of Edgar Allan Poe, who was, he said, his “favorite writer” at the time, and he told me Poe had once resided in the Bronx, “somewhere not too far from here.” Before long, he was also reading novels of Mark Twain and, soon after
that, he told me he’d been “circling Charles Dickens” but could not decide if he was “ready” for him yet.

“My one big problem,” as he put it to me, was that he could find no bookstores near his home, “and for that matter, if the truth be told, there isn’t even any bookstore anywhere in all of the South Bronx.” The pastor—in those days he spoke of Martha as “the reverend”—had taken him to a bookstore in Manhattan where, he said, he very much enjoyed looking through the aisles for a book that he had heard of.

“ ‘Prowling,’ ” he said, “is the word that comes to mind” when he wasn’t always positive about the book he wanted but liked to look around for something that the poet might have mentioned in their conversations. “Then I’d see it! Then I’d realize that was why I’d gone there in the first place. Check it out! I like to be surprised!”

A year or two later, we began to go together to the Barnes & Noble store that faced directly upon Union Square, in which there were lots of sofas and secluded corners where he could sit and narrow down the books he had collected to the ones he really planned to read. I noticed that he had a rather courtly manner of enlisting the affectionate assistance of people working in the store. Young women seemed especially susceptible to his repeated pleas for help in finding books he thought that he was looking for. And when, as often happened, he asked them for a title he had gotten wrong, or for an author whose name he could not summon up correctly, they seldom seemed to get impatient with him but appeared to take a real delight in helping him untangle his confusions.

When the time arrived for Jeremy to apply to high school, his mother was concerned and uncertain what to do, because she knew the problems of the high schools at first-hand—Jeremy’s brother had gone to a school that
graduated less than a quarter of its students. He’d been on the verge of dropping out (or, if my memory is right, he may already have dropped out) when she sent him back to Puerto Rico.

It was the spring of 1995. Word was spreading of a newly founded school in the South Bronx, one of the first of the so-called “small academies” that would become, within a few more years, the newest urban answer to the chronic failings of the larger high schools serving concentrated populations of the black and brown and very poor. Martha intervened to win a place for Jeremy, although she did not do so without reservations because of information she and I had both received indicating that the school might not be exactly what its boosters claimed. Still, any school that offered Jeremy an avenue of exit from the kind of large, impersonal, and overcrowded institution that his brother had attended seemed to her worth trying.

The school turned out, however, not to be the richly academic institution it was said to be but was wedded to an ethos of instructional severity at the cost of intellectual vitality, with none of the expansiveness of learning or interest in the individuality of children that would be the starting point of education in a more enlightened school. A narrow emphasis on pumping up the scores on standardized exams appeared, as best I could discern, to be the top priority.

Jeremy’s unorthodox mentality was not well suited to this school. The teachers there were not impressed with his precocity and free-roaming intellectuality. His curiosity about the world of history and poetry to which he’d been awakened by the poet who befriended him and the earnest independence that led him into writing lengthy narratives and offering discursive answers to the questions teachers asked of him—none of this endeared him to a faculty devoted to the inculcation of those skills required by test-taking.

He would grow distracted while sitting through a class that asked for no participation from the students other than to spit up predetermined answers. He would daydream often. He’d fill his notebooks with satiric stories or eccentric questions to which he knew that no one at the school would care to give an answer. As a result, he was frequently removed from class and placed in a kind of holding room, which he called “the isolation chamber,” with other students whose behavior was regarded as resistant or disruptive and where, he said, they were given no instruction. When important visitors showed up at the school, “they quickly put us back into our classrooms.”

When Martha learned of this, she went directly to the school and asked to see the principal. The principal told Martha that, on the basis of his noncooperative behavior and poor performance on examinations, Jeremy was not a likely candidate for college.

Martha was, of course, unwilling to accept this. So she started reaching out, as she had done with other students from St. Ann’s, to see if she could locate some alternatives. As a short-term form of intervention, I proposed that Jeremy might benefit from a summer program at a boarding school I knew in Massachusetts that, in the normal academic year, enrolled primarily children of the affluent but, in its summer session, made an effort to enroll more children of low income.

Jeremy’s reaction was enthusiastic. His mother, after she had seen the school and met some of the teachers—Martha, I believe, went with her and Jeremy on a day’s excursion—gave her full approval.

He seemed to revel in the two months that he spent there. I went out twice, early in July and again a few weeks later, to get to know his teachers. His English teacher had been reading stories he had written and told me that his narrative skills were “far above grade level” and, as
I already knew, that “he reads voraciously.” He did note that Jeremy “reaches out for books I should think might be rather hard for him. Sometimes they are. But sometimes he surprises me.”

By the end of July, he was in the middle of rehearsals for a play that was to be performed in the last week of the session. I did not confess to him that I had a plan in mind—I did, however, mention this to Martha—that was a bit conspiratorial. I was toying with a notion that went beyond a single summer in New England but might open up another, more ambitious option for the future.

It was too late to act upon this for the year ahead, so in September Jeremy continued at his high school in the Bronx. I urged him, for his own sake, to make a greater effort to conform, for now, to the demands imposed upon him. Meanwhile, he continued meeting with the poet, Mr. Castro. One evening, on Thanksgiving weekend, when the poet’s granddaughter was there, the two of them, at the poet’s instigation, read lines from Romeo and Juliet to each other. They had a good time playing with Elizabethan phrases and talking in Elizabethan language to one another while they were eating dinner.

Before I left New York, we made another visit to the Barnes & Noble store where he had come to feel at home. He prevailed upon me to buy a copy of Bram Stoker’s horror novel Dracula, which, he said, he was “somewhat shocked” to learn I’d never read. I made a bargain with him. I would do my best to get through Dracula if he’d agree to buy Great Expectations and, instead of further “circling” Charles Dickens, would make a concentrated effort to complete it. He conceded to me later that he got the best part of that bargain.

For all his seeming social ease while we were in the comfortable setting of a bookstore, there were certain things
he said to me, and certain things that happened to him in the winter of that year, that were sharp reminders of the limits of his confidence. The relaxed and humorous enjoyment that he took in chatting with good-natured grown-ups in the store at Union Square, where he seemed to feel defended and protected by the pantheon of favored books and authors he had gradually created for himself, stood in contrast to his vulnerable status and physically exposed condition in the streets of his own neighborhood. The dangers that surrounded him grew very real to me when he was robbed at knifepoint one night in December.

When I asked him where this had happened, he replied, “In my apartment building.”

“In the lobby?”

“No. Between two floors.”

He explained that he was walking up to his apartment “because the elevator didn’t want to come down to the lobby.” When he turned a corner at one of the landings, he found himself surrounded by three men with knives.

“Did you know them?”

“No,” he said. “They weren’t from our building.”

When I asked him what they took, he said, “My Chinese food.”

“Did they take your money?”

“Just one dollar. That was all I had.”

“Did you tell your mother?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you report it?”

“No,” he said. “That would be more dangerous.”

“Did you tell Martha?”

“Yes,” he said. “I asked if she would get me something I can use if I get attacked again.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Peppermint spray,” he answered.

“I’ve never heard of that.”

He reflected on this for a moment. Then: “I said it wrong. I think the word is ‘pepper spray.’ ”

“Is she going to get it for you?”

“She’s still thinking.”

“What does your mother say?”

“She does not approve of it.”

I told him I agreed with her.

A few months later, he called me at my home with more disturbing news. It didn’t have to do with him but with a student in his class who, he told me, was one of the only people at the school whom he regarded as a friend. The student, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been raped and strangled in the hallway of a building not far from her home. According to Jeremy, she was “advanced in all her subjects” and “a very nice person” and, he said, “maybe the nicest person you could ever want to know.” The newspapers said the building where the girl was murdered had been nearly vacant and had been infested with crack users.

Murders and assaults, as we have seen, were not uncommon in the South Bronx at the time. A year or two before, I’d counted more than twenty
children and teenagers who had died of violence within the blocks around St. Ann’s. But the victims of those crimes had not been acquaintances of Jeremy. In this case, it was his friend who was the victim.

Toward the end of April of that year, Martha asked if I’d pursued the notion I had told her I was toying with since Jeremy returned from summer school the previous September. I told her I had kept in touch with the headmaster and had spoken with him, although only tentatively up to now, about the possibility that Jeremy might qualify as a full-time student. He had been reserved at first because he said he’d recognized in the summer session that Jeremy, while he was advanced in writing skills and reading, was well below grade level in most of his other subjects. He
wanted to reflect upon it more and discuss with members of his faculty the difficulties Jeremy would face in making this transition.

I called him now and said I’d like to talk with him in person as soon as it was possible. We set a date for the following week. When I came into his office on the day appointed, he told me he’d arrived at a decision.