Fire in the Ashes (3 page)

The priest of the church, an extraordinary woman whose name is Martha Overall, came to St. Ann’s with a deep commitment to the children of the neighborhood. She was also well equipped to help the parents of the children deal with the legal problems and bureaucratic obstacles that people who depended upon welfare inevitably faced. A graduate of Radcliffe College, where she had studied economics, she also drew upon the adversarial and strategic skills she had acquired as a lawyer who had been a protégé of a famous litigator by the name of Louis Nizer.

Even while she practiced law, Martha had been working as a volunteer and advocate for families in Mott Haven, so when she turned her back upon the law and chose a life of service in the ministry, she already had a thorough understanding of the sense of helplessness that people in the area frequently experienced in dealing with their landlords or with government officials. She was masterful, and she could be very tough, in her confrontations with people in positions of authority. But she was warm and gentle with people in the parish who came to her in need.

Vicky quickly grew attached to Martha, and she and the children soon began to come to church almost every Sunday. On the weekdays, Eric sometimes came there on his own, mostly to play basketball. Now and then, he brought his sister with him.

Eric struck me as a complicated boy. In spite of all he had been through, he had an element of likability and even of good humor. But he found it difficult to be transparent in his conversations and relationships with older people at the church who took an interest in him. As I watched him in the next few years, I could not help noticing the frequently evasive—maybe self-protective—way that he would speak to grown-ups when they questioned him. It was a hint, but only that, that he was concealing things that might stir up worries for his mother if she knew of them.

But she worried anyway. She told me she had seen this tendency—“not always bein’ straight with me” is the way she put it—starting in the period when they were still at the Prince George. But she said she’d noticed this more frequently since they’d been resettled in the Bronx. She said she never knew what he was holding back, but she was watching him uneasily.…

One day in the fall of 1995, Vicky came into the church while I was helping at the afterschool. She came right up behind me and leaned down and whispered “Hi!” before I knew that she was there. She seemed in such a pleasant mood that it surprised me when, a moment later, she asked with a slight tremble in her voice if I had the time to go outside and talk with her.

As soon as we had left the church, she began to cry. She didn’t tell me what was wrong, and I didn’t ask. She was wearing sneakers, baggy slacks, a loose-fitting sweater, and a floppy-looking hat. Her clothes were clean but her appearance was disheveled.

We went out for a walk.

Sometimes when a person that I know appears to be distraught, I have a tendency to think there has to be an explanation that I can discover if I ask exactly the right questions. I feel embarrassed later when I realize that there isn’t any simple answer to my questions. Usually I know this in advance but, because of something in my personality or education, I often fall into this trap of thinking that the answer lies in talkative solutions. Walking around without a destination sometimes leaves an open space that isn’t filled already with my own predictive suppositions.

Vicky never told me exactly what it was that made her cry that afternoon. I knew, of course, she was concerned about her children. Eric, who was sixteen now, was not doing well in school. The high school he attended was one of those places, misleadingly referred to as “academies,” familiar in the Bronx and other inner-city neighborhoods, where the course of study had been stripped of programs that might stimulate a student academically and instead was geared to practical and terminal instruction. Having lost so many years of education while he had been homeless—most of the children in the shelters, as I’ve noted, had seen their schooling interrupted frequently—his basic skills were already very low. His attendance was, in any case, haphazard.

Vicky couldn’t help him much because she’d had so little education of her own. Her mother had died when she was five and, for some reason she did not explain, she was taken from her father and given to a guardian who, however, seemed to have abandoned the customary obligations of a guardian. She had had to leave school during junior high, which she said was not unusual in the rural part of Georgia where she had been born, and went to work “cleanin’ houses, doin’ laundry for white people” for most of the next four years. By the time her son was born and she was married and her husband brought her to New York,
schooling was no longer in her mind. Although her writing skills were good (she had learned a kind of slanted printing in her grade-school years), she had little understanding of the work that Eric was supposed to do at his alleged “academy.”

Lisette was in the seventh grade and was a better student but had also been assigned to a bottom-rated school, which was called a “school for medical careers” but did not offer courses that would likely lead to any kind of medical career beyond, perhaps, a low-paid job within a nursing home, and pretty much precluded any opportunity to move on to the kind of high school that would open up the possibilities for college.

The apartment where the city had resettled them consisted of three tiny rooms on the fourth floor of a six-story building where there was no elevator, no bell, and no intercom. To visit with Vicky you had to yell up from the street and she or Eric or Lisette would lean out of their window and throw down the key to the front door.

Vicky and her children were living on a welfare stipend which, including food stamps and some other benefits, amounted to approximately $7,000 yearly. (According to Martha, this was even less than the average income for a family in the area, which she pegged at
$8,000 for a year’s subsistence.) She supplemented this by getting up at 5:00 a.m. two days a week to go to a food pantry at one of the housing projects, where she had to be assigned a ticket with a number to establish her priority but then was forced to wait for an hour and a half, or else go home and then return, before she actually received a bag of groceries.

The only job she’d had since moving to the Bronx was cleaning houses or apartments in Manhattan, which, she said, was something she was glad to do, but was also forced to do as part of her welfare obligation in New York. “One lady, Mrs. Jacobs, lived on Second Avenue. The other one
lived—let me see, on 14th Street, somewhere around Greenwich Village.” Both were elderly; one was home-bound. “They were nice to me,” she said but for some reason she could not explain, this heavily promoted “work experience program” lasted only six months and did not lead to permanent employment.

She was candid with me, and herself, in her recognition that at least some of the suffering she had undergone had been of her own making. While she had been homeless, she had grown attached to a kindly-seeming man who was good to her at first but who was subject to depressive swings of mood and soon began abusing her. Once she had her own apartment, she took out an order of protection, but her boyfriend kept on coming back, she said, when he was depressed or hungry. Sometimes when he showed up at the door, she told me that she lacked the will to keep him out. On more than one occasion, he had beaten her severely.

I asked her if she prayed.

“I do pray—but not out loud.” She said, “I pray inside.”

Amidst the sadness of the conversation, she kept reaching out for gaiety. A nervous laugh would precede the revelation of a longing or a memory that brought an evanescent sense of satisfaction to her mind. “I pray,” she said, “for something that I haven’t done for thirteen years.”

I asked her what it was.

“To pick up my knitting needles,” she replied.

A soft smile lighted up her eyes. “I used to make a sweater in three weeks if I had nothin’ to upset me. I’d start when it was summertime and I’d have six sweaters made for Christmas.… If you ever see me get my needles out again, you’ll know I’m feelin’ happy.”

At the corner of Brook Avenue, she stopped next to the stairs that led down to the subway station, looking in a vague, distracted way at a woman in a long skirt who was
selling bunches of chrysanthemums and roses. She reached out her hand in the direction of the roses but it seemed she didn’t dare to touch them.

“Would you like them?”

“One rose,” she replied.

Tiny drops of water sparkled on the petals. She held the flower in her hand against her chest as we were walking back in the direction of St. Ann’s. At the corner, she looked left and right. Then, with relief, she told me, “There you go!” and waved across the street.

Lisette was coming up the avenue with a couple of her friends. When she saw her mother she ran into her arms. Taking a bunch of papers from her backpack, she showed her a book report she’d done that day at school. It had been marked A-plus by her teacher. Her mother studied the book report, kissed her on the cheek, then handed her the keys to the apartment and two dollars to buy something at the store.

“An A-plus on a book report doesn’t mean a whole lot at this school she goes to,” Vicky said once Lisette was gone. “Her teachers like her. They do the best they can. But I don’t think that they can give her what a girl with her potential ought to have.…

“You see, this is the best that I can get for her right now. I don’t accept it—yet I do, because I don’t know any choice I have.” But a moment after that her gaiety returned. “See?” she said. “I know she’s home. She’s safe upstairs and we have food to eat. And so, for now, I’m happy. There you go!”

Her moods were like that. Sometimes sadness. Sometimes gaiety. Sometimes a bright burst of jubilation. Then she would crash down—so fast—into the pit of a depressive darkness. Then she would be fighting back again and searching for her jubilation like a person looking for an object that she’d put away into a drawer somewhere and
temporarily could not be found. She laughed that nervous laugh, it seemed, when she was near the tipping point between exhilaration and surrender.

In November 1996, a doctor called me from his office in a small town in Montana. He said his name was Dr. William Edwards. He told me that a group of people at his church had read my book Amazing Grace, about the children in the Bronx, and had called a meeting of their congregation. The members of the church, he said, decided that it was “appropriate” for them “to find a place in our community” for any family that believed they’d have a better chance in life in a setting very different from New York.

I did not know how I should react to this idea at first. I’d never received a call like that from a total stranger and, although I knew almost nothing of Montana, I found it hard to picture any family that I knew beginning life all over in a place so far away, and so unlike New York.

But the doctor’s explanations were so plain and simple—it was a nice town, he said, the schools were good, the congregation was prepared to find a house and fix it up and pay the rent at first and help out with the food expenses for a while, and he was a family doctor and had children and grandchildren of his own—that I told him I’d pass all this information on to Reverend Overall and that she would likely call him back if there was ever any interest from a family at St. Ann’s.

I pass on a number of more modest offers and suggestions every year to ministers and teachers and other people working in poor neighborhoods and never know for sure if they’ll materialize. Some of them do. Churches and synagogues routinely ask me for the names of schools or churches in the Bronx and frequently they follow through
with shipments of computers, books, and other educational materials. Religious congregations from as far away as Maine and Pennsylvania have invited groups of children from St. Ann’s to visit them for extended periods of time. But moving an entire family some 2,000 miles to a small town in Montana that I’d never heard of was in a different ballpark altogether.

There’s another reason why I hesitated to respond to Dr. Edwards’s invitation. There is an intimidating rhetoric of cultural defensiveness in many inner-city neighborhoods like those of the South Bronx, which sometimes has the power to inhibit any actions that might tend to break down racial borders and to stigmatize the people who propose them as “invasive” or “paternalistic.” There is a kind of mantra that one often hears from local power brokers in neighborhoods like these that the way to “fix” a ghettoized community is, first of all, never to describe it in such terms and, second, to
remain
there and do everything you can to improve it and promote its reputation. Those who choose to leave are seen as vaguely traitorous, and those who help them leave are often seen as traitorous as well.

Sometimes ideology and rhetoric like this can introduce an element of complicated and neurotic inhibition into issues that should be decided by the people they will actually affect. I wasted a few days debating whether to dismiss the whole idea and, at one point, I nearly threw away the name and number of the doctor. Then, to end my indecision, I sent the information he had given me to Martha and more or less forgot about it for a while.…

A month later, in the middle of December, Vicky came into St. Ann’s in a state of desolation: beaten again, eyes purple, worried sick about her son, who was not attending
school, worried about welfare, worried about clinic visits, worried about rent and food.

The telephone in the office rang while she was sitting there talking to the pastor. “It was the doctor from Montana,” Martha told me later. I didn’t know if she had called him earlier that day or if the timing of his phone call was a sheer coincidence.

“We had another meeting,” Dr. Edwards said. “The invitation is still there.”

Martha told him, “Wait a minute,” and, looking at Victoria, she told her there was someone on the phone that she might like to talk with.

“I had to leave the office then and go downstairs into the afterschool,” she said. “When I came back, Vicky and the doctor were still talking. When she put the phone down, I asked her what she thought. She reached out for my hands. It must have seemed unreal to her. I told her that she ought to give herself a lot of time to think about it and discuss it with the children. I gave her Dr. Edwards’s number and told her she could call him anytime she wanted, and I suggested that she ought to question him some more.