Fire in the Ashes (33 page)

The attorney convinced him to agree to a plea bargain, one in which he pleaded guilty, but to a lesser charge than the sale of heroin, and with the understanding that the prosecution would reduce the sentence it would seek for him. The prosecution, it appears, accepted his plea bargain. As a result, he was released from Rikers Island on the day before Thanksgiving with the date of sentencing set for eight weeks later. On January 20, he was sentenced to six months in prison and five years of probation.

The court gave him credit for the four months he’d already spent at Rikers Island and an extra two months because of “good behavior,” so, as it turned out, the sentence he was given had already been served. He would, however, be obliged to meet with his probation officer on an intensive basis. This, I knew—at least I hoped—would make him far more wary about going out at night with people who were using drugs or selling them or, for that matter, who were simply living, as he had done for several years, along the outer edge of criminality.

There was an unexpected benefit in the months that Angelo had spent at Rikers Island.
The prison runs a number of education programs, some of which I’ve been able to
observe. Excellent instructors from the New York City public schools deliver Adult Basic Education to the lowest-level learners—those who never learned to read and write when they were in school. For inmates at a more proficient level, the prison also runs a program for the GED. Angelo seized upon the opportunity and took advantage of the preparation he was able to receive in classes that were half the size of those he’d had in middle school and high school.

In the months that followed his release, he finally passed the GED in social sciences and high-school-level English language skills. He’s studying now to pass the GED in math and science also.

Angelo is a very different person now from the injudicious boy who went into that corner store and, in so doing, walked into the arms of the police. One of the major reasons is a happy alteration in the make-up of his family and, as a direct result, the nature of his life at home.

Angelo’s mother decided to remarry about seven years ago and, soon after, she gave birth to twins—a boy named Timothy, a girl named Violeta. When they were born, Angelo was still caught up in the behavior that led him into problems with the law. It was only after he came home from Rikers Island—the twins were nearly six by then—that he began to stabilize his state of mind enough to take a healthy and constructive role within the children’s lives.

Their father is an older person, now in his late sixties. He has a heart condition that has recently required surgery. For these reasons, and perhaps for others of which I’m unaware, he has not become an active presence as a parent in their home. Angelo has, in effect, become the father of his younger siblings.

He wakes them up. He gives them their breakfast. He walks them to their school. He comes back to wait for them at the end of school. If his mother’s working late, he cooks their supper. He puts them into their pajamas. He sits beside
them while they do their homework, and he helps them with their homework, before he lets them watch TV—but “only for an hour.” Then he puts them into bed and reads to them before they fall asleep.

One night this year when I was there, Violeta said she had a dream the night before. It was about Angelo. “He was in my room at school, and he and I were exactly the same size, and there was a dog with brown hair and white spots in between our chairs. The teacher said, ‘If the dog knows how to talk, he can stay. If it’s not a talking dog, he will have to leave.’ ”

Angelo scooped her up and held her in his arms and swung her in a circle all around the room.

Timothy told me that he had two teachers at his school. One of them, he said, was named “Miss Chicken Pea”—Angelo said the name was “Chicopee.” The other was “Miss Song.” He and Angelo took me in to see the bunk beds where he and Violeta slept. He climbed up to the bed on top, then swung around gymnastically and landed on the bed below. “You can call me Spider-Man,” he said. Angelo tickled him on the bottoms of his feet. Violeta came into the room. She wanted to be tickled, too.

Angelo works in the hours while the children are at school—apart-time job, “a restaurant job, around the corner from my home”—but he says he misses them until he picks them up at four. The sweetness of the evenings that he spends with them at home functions as a counterforce to whatever anger other young men in his situation often feel—at themselves or at the world—after they have undergone so many troubles for so many years. And he’s not embittered by the insufficiencies of education he encountered after he had left behind the good years he had spent in elementary school, although it’s possible he has a right to be.

In September, Angelo and I were having dinner in the Bronx at a place called Camaguey, a small Honduran restaurant—four tables on one side, a counter and six barstools on the other. While we were eating, Angelo stood up from his chair and stared very hard at an attractive woman who was wearing denim shorts and sitting at the counter having a cold beer.

My first reaction was that he was hoping he might capture her attention. But, after he sat down, he leaned across the table and asked if I remembered who she was.

I told him that I had a distant memory that she was somebody I might have known before. It was the soft configuration of her jaw and the deep expressiveness within her dark brown eyes that made me think I might have met her once. But I wasn’t sure.

“Remember when you used to visit in my second grade? There was a student in my class that I liked to tease and Miss Dukes had to scold me? And she seated her as far from me as possible?”

I remembered that he used to tease a bashful little girl, but I told him I could not recall her name.

“Tabitha Brown,” Angelo replied.

At the mention of her name, the woman turned halfway around, hesitated for a moment as if she wasn’t certain whether it was Angelo, then got up, came over to our table with the cold beer in her hand, said hello to Angelo in a warm and friendly way, and took a chair from another table and sat down.

Angelo told her that I used to visit them in the second grade. She did not remember this, but she was polite and poised and held out her hand to me and spoke to me
respectfully. She smiled when I said how much I liked Miss Dukes.

“I loved Miss Dukes,” said Tabitha. “
This one
”—she gave a nod at Angelo—“gave her a hard time.”

Angelo said not a word.

“He was a wicked little boy,” she said. “He teased me without mercy.”

I asked if she remembered other teachers at the school and, not to my surprise, she spoke of Miss Harrinarine. She said she was “forever grateful to that woman” because “she was the first teacher that I ever had who made me realize I could go to college. She kind of held me by the hand, and, later on, when I was in high school, I would ask for her advice. If I called her after school she’d always call me back.…”

Tabitha said she knew that she was fortunate because her parents did not let her go to middle school or high school here in the South Bronx. After P.S. 30, she had gone to school in a suburban district where her aunt and uncle lived. From high school, she had gone directly into college, but was taking off a year to work and save up money for her senior year.

She struck me as a confident and serious young woman, not at all the bashful child I remembered from so many years before, and, when she joked with Angelo about his schoolboy days, she did it in an amiable but very grown-up way, as if she felt much older than he was. When she left to head out to the street, Angelo watched her with, I thought, a hint of something like intimidation in his eyes.

The following day, he told me he was thinking about Tabitha. She had done “so much,” he said, and had gone so far beyond the point where both of them had started out. She had gone to college—not some kind of “institute” that advertised for customers in the Daily News—and she made
it very clear that she planned to graduate. He did not sound envious of Tabitha, but he seemed to be subdued.

I reminded him that Tabitha had some big advantages that neither he nor many other children in the neighborhood had had. In view of all the disappointments and the years of misdirection he had undergone, I told him that his own achievements were impressive too. I said I thought he should be proud of the calm and steady life he was leading now. I hope that he believed me.

When friends of mine who take an empathetic interest in the lives of children of the very poor try to picture what “success” might represent for kids who grow up in those sections of our cities where poverty and racial isolation are the norm, they tend to gravitate to the iconic narratives of children such as Pineapple and Jeremy, and others such as Tabitha, whose victories seem indisputable because they are recognizable in familiar academic terms. “They struggle hard. They get into college. They graduate from college. They contribute to society.” And, in Jeremy’s case, and Pineapple’s, and that of her sisters, all of this is obviously true. I still feel a sense of wonderment at what those three young women have accomplished up to this point in their lives.

But “success,” an arbitrary term at best, takes a wide variety of forms, some of which do not glow so visibly. Angelo did not have the opportunities that Jeremy and Pineapple received. He never had the conversational exposure—to history, to books, to questions about ethics, and to challenging ideas—that Jeremy was given by the pastor and the poet and his other mentors. Nor did he have the very strong parental backing that Pineapple knew she could depend upon. His father, it will be recalled, had been in
prison from the time when Angelo was born. His mother, kindly woman that she is, did not have the temperament or determination to oversee his education and could not help him to control the furious defensiveness that erupted in him in his adolescent years.

But seven sessions in the Tombs and four months at Rikers Island have not destroyed the qualities of decency and earnestness, and persistent innocence—that “real light in his eyes” that Mr. Rogers noted when he took the photograph of Angelo that now hangs here on my wall. He isn’t slick. He isn’t glib. He isn’t cruel. He isn’t mean. He’s a kind and loving human being, which is not the case with many of the more sophisticated people that I know who have been to college or have multiple degrees. To me, those qualities of elemental goodness in his soul matter more than anything.

This is about my godson. I saved his story for the last, because it was the hardest one to write.

Benjamin lived on Beekman Ave in one of the Diego-Beekman buildings owned by Gerald Schuster, the slumlord and political contributor. The Wild Cowboys ruled the street when Benjamin was growing up. “Crack and heroin,” he recalls, “were everywhere.”

Benjamin’s mother died when he was twelve, in 1992. She had five children. Only two are still alive.

His oldest brother was shot dead when Benjamin was eight. He had been a drug dealer in Brooklyn.

A second brother, Edward, whom I knew to a degree because he begged for money in front of a coffee shop and pizza place where I used to go with Jeremy, was a ghostly figure, wasted by addiction and frequently arrested. He choked to death on his own internal fluids while in the custody of the police.

A third brother disappeared after his mother passed away and, having never reappeared, is “presumed dead,” in the language of the law.

Benjamin has a sister who is his elder by twelve years. Addicted to crack at seventeen, she has been convicted countless times for sale of drugs, use of drugs, robbery, and gun possession. She has spent more of her life in prison than she has on the outside.

Benjamin was raped at the age of nine. It happened in his own home on his mother’s bed. He was raped by Edward, the drug-addicted brother whom I used to see on the corner outside of the coffee shop.

When he was ten, he began to steal as a way to bring home money to his mother. She was very sick by then with the cancer that would kill her two years later.

With his mother’s passing, and no father in his life (he scarcely knew his father, who was an alcoholic), there was no one in his family left alive or capable of offering protection other than his sister when she was not in prison, and what she could offer by way of protection was not without entanglements that endangered him still more. Benjamin was on his own or, at least, he would have been had it not been for the fact that Martha had already come to know him by that time.

Martha was not yet the pastor of St. Ann’s when his mother became ill, but she was familiar with people in the neighborhood because of the years in which she was a lawyer and had done pro bono work in the community. Later, when she began her preparation for the priesthood, she did her fieldwork at the church as a seminarian. Once she was ordained, she returned there in the role of an assistant priest. It was in that year, prior to the time in 1993 when she was appointed to be pastor, that she and Benjamin had become acquainted with each other.

“One day,” she said, “Benjamin came into the church
and asked me for a job. He was all of eleven years old. I didn’t really have a job that I could give him, but I liked him right away and could see he wanted someone he could talk to. After that, he began to come here every Sunday. Then he asked if he could be an acolyte, and the first Sunday when he stood there at the altar was the day I met his mother. She was in enormous pain, but she got up out of bed and came here to the church, because she wouldn’t miss that day for anything.

“At that time,” Martha said, “Benjamin’s mother was living in the kind of destitution that most people who don’t live in neighborhoods like this one could not easily imagine. In the four years prior to the time we met, she never had the money to cook Thanksgiving dinner for him in their home. They had to line up at soup kitchens and hope to get their dinner by the grace of charity.” There were days, she said, when they had no food at all—apart from what Katrice and Martha packaged up and sent home with Benjamin.