Fire in the Ashes (38 page)

I said, “I’m going to steal those words.”

“Do it!” she said. And she asked if I remembered something that I told her once when we were walking by the water near her parents’ home. “You know? Picking battles that we have a chance to win? And not getting frozen up and flustered in your mind by things that are too big for you and me to change, not at least for now. Which isn’t any use to anyone at all.”

I said, “I think I’ll steal those words as well.”

“Do it!” she said a second time. “You’re the one who said that to me anyway. I’ll give it back to you for free.” She laughed. “I’m only teasing you.…

“Wow! You know? It’s been too long. Once you’re finished with the book, I’m coming back to visit you. And I think I’d like to stay a few more days than last time. I know that sounds a little pushy, but I like to hang around there in the kitchen with you guys. And, besides, we’ve got a lot to talk about. You know?”

The small discretionary fund that has helped Pineapple and some of the other children and a few of the adults portrayed within these pages was established many years ago as a nonprofit charitable foundation with support from readers of my books. Those who would like to learn more about this fund, or to help sustain it, are invited to contact the Education Action Fund, 16 Lowell Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Readers who would also like to be updated on the efforts of my colleagues, and myself, to bring about the changes in our public schools that would render philanthropic interventions marginal in their significance by providing equal opportunity to every child in this land, and on a nonselective basis, are welcome to write to the same address, or to visit our web page at
JonathanKozol.com/EducationActionInc
.

In the course of working on this book, I have had the wonderful experience of being able to enlist many of the children who grew up in the Bronx as my active partners and researchers as I tell the stories of their later lives. Pineapple and her older sister, Lara, have helped me with a multitude of small corrections, and some very big ones, throughout the stages of this writing. So, too, did Jeremy, who updated me repeatedly on events that he observed first-hand and changes that he saw emerging in the streets around St. Ann’s. Lisette and Miranda have generously assisted me as well. The young man I call Angelo and my godson Benjamin have also helped me greatly in areas that draw upon their own awareness of the dangers they have now escaped but which continue to be present in the lives of those around them.

The woman I call Ariella Patterson has also been unusually meticulous in helping me to check elusive details—time-factors, for example, and physical locations of various events, when I was in doubt. She’s also had no hesitation about leading me to reconsider the thematic emphases of certain portions of the early manuscript and the final version of this book, especially those narratives in which I try to understand the formative distortions that predisposed a number of the young men I’ve described to fall into the patterns that destroyed them.

To all these people, young and old, and others whom I have not named, who trusted me to tell their stories and then became my colleagues in describing the entire context
of the world in which they came of age and live today, I owe a debt of gratitude.

I also want to thank two bright and energetic college undergraduates and literary scholars, Jacey Rubinstein and Julia Barnard, who studied this book with eagle eyes, and helped me to reconceive several of its chapters, when they came to Cambridge to work with me as interns. Jacey has continued to assist me long after she completed her internship. My thanks, too, to Amy Ehntholt, who’s worked with me on earlier books and gave me her kind assistance on this book as well.

Reverend Martha Overall examined all the sections of this book that portray the children with whom she’s remained in contact since the years when they were very young, as well as the sections that describe the details of her own career. I have, as in my other books about the children of the Bronx, been grateful for the absolute integrity and unflinching candor with which she has advised me and for the enduring dedication that she brings to bear in every aspect of her service to the disenfranchised and the poor.

Steven Banks, the Legal Aid attorney to whom I’ve turned repeatedly beginning in the years when families in the homeless shelters were in need of his assistance, has helped me understand the workings of the courts and the legal status of young people in New York when they were arrested, or detained, or awaiting sentence. I’m grateful for the time he took in clarifying aspects of the penal system in which Angelo and others were entangled.

I’m particularly indebted to my publishers at Crown for their kindness and forbearance in waiting all this time for a book I promised to them more than seven years ago. My special thanks to my intuitively sensitive and supportive editor, Vanessa Mobley.

In writing about the inner lives and outward struggles of people who have trusted me for many years out of a sense
of faith in my discretion and my loyalty, I have relied upon a gentle and judicious friend who had the rare capacity for guiding me through delicate decisions. Lily Jones came to work with me in Cambridge at the moment when I was about to launch into this book. From conception to completion, she has been not only a remarkable researcher and painstaking editor, the kind of ally every writer prays for. Even more important, as I was working on the stories of those children and adults who underwent the greatest tribulations or suffered most profoundly for the loss of those they loved, Lily has repeatedly uplifted me by her gift for seeing the redemptive aspects of their lives—an affirming quality not unlike the one that drew her to Pineapple.

Young as she is, but wise beyond her years, Lily has been instrumental in the writing of this book and has brought a wealth of blessings to this author from a heart of gold and a soul of selfless generosity. Words cannot express my gratitude.

  
1
NUMBER OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN THE
M
ARTINIQUE HOTEL
, C
HRISTMAS 1985
: Interviews with Thomas Styron, Robert Hayes, and others working at the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York, December 1985;
New York Daily News
, December 24, 1985; “Monthly Report,” Center for Immigration Studies, October and November 1986, June 1987.

  
2
REFERENCE TO AUTHOR TEACHING IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY OF BOSTON
: I described this in
Death at an Early Age
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

  
3
ASBESTOS IN THE
M
ARTINIQUE HOTEL
: According to the
New York Daily News
(June 19, 1987), “A mountain of cancer-causing asbestos—illegally packed in open containers—was uncovered yesterday in the Martinique Hotel.… Dangerous asbestos-coated pipes were also found in the hotel’s lobby and on the sidewalk.” Also see
New York Times
, June 19, 1987.

  
4
A RELATIVE OF ONE OF THE TWO OWNERS AND HIS ABUSIVE TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN THE BUILDING
: The social workers told me this with confidence, on the basis of their conversations with the relative, and indicated it was common knowledge. Several female tenants in the Martinique confirmed that it was true. The social workers who introduced me to the young man did not tell him, I assume, that I was a writer.

  
5
GARBAGE BAGS TO COVER HOT PLATES
: Families were told by the hotel to hide their hot plates in drawers, but garbage bags were provided for those that would not fit. I describe this and other practices of the hotel’s management in
Rachel and Her Children
(New York: Crown, 1988).

  
6
AUTHOR’S BOOK ABOUT THE
M
ARTINIQUE HOTEL
:
Rachel and Her Children
, cited above, was initially published in
The New Yorker
as
The Homeless and Their Children
on January 25 and February 1, 1988. The
Nightline
episode featuring the Martinique aired on March 21, 1988.

  
7
MANAGER OF MARTINIQUE CARRIED PISTOL ON HIS ANKLE
: Many residents of the Martinique spoke to me with apprehension of Sal Tuccelli’s gun, which I saw on one occasion. He usually carried it in an ankle holster or, according to the tenants, sometimes on his waist. See
Rachel and Her Children
, cited above, and my more
recent book
Ordinary Resurrections
(New York: Crown, 2000). Also see
Village Voice
, April 1, 1986.

  
7
JOURNALISTS WERE NOT WELCOME IN THE BUILDING
: Although they were not officially forbidden—CBS got into the building with a camera crew in 1986 (
New York Times
, April 21, 1986)—journalists faced resistance and hostility on the part of the guards and manager. Residents who spoke critically of the hotel to members of the media placed themselves at risk. According to a city employee, it was “an accepted understanding” that the hotel would find a way to justify the eviction of such tenants. See
Rachel and Her Children
, cited above.

  
8
$8 MILLION YEARLY FOR 400 FAMILIES
: See
Rachel and Her Children
, cited above. Investigative reporter William Bastone noted in the
Village Voice
(April 1, 1986), that $1,800 was “an accurate estimate” of the city’s monthly cost for housing a homeless family in the hotels controlled by the owners of the Martinique. The cost of housing the 400 families in the Martinique was in excess of $8 million yearly.

  
9
WHEN THESE HOTELS WERE FINALLY CLOSED IN 1988 AND 1989
: In the last few weeks of 1988, according to the
New York Times
(December 27, 1988), families were “hurriedly moved out of the Martinique … as the Koch administration rushes to empty one of the largest and most troubled welfare hotels in the city by the end of the year.” Conditions at the Martinique, as in the other large hotels being used to house the homeless, were, by this time, “a national scandal,” according to the
Times
, and “the city had been threatened with an imminent cutoff of Federal funds to pay the hotel bills.” Also see
New York Times
, March 9, 1988, September 5 and November 11, 1989.

  
10
AMONG THE HIGHEST RATES OF PEDIATRIC ASTHMA IN THE NATION
: I was told this repeatedly by pediatricians and family-practice specialists familiar with the most impoverished sections of the Bronx. I was also given evidence that the rate within these neighborhoods was by far the highest in New York. According to a zip-code breakdown of hospitalizations statewide in New York shown to me by Dr. Robert Massad of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, the rate of admissions for asthma at the start of the 1990s was 2.5 per thousand for New York City as a whole but 6 to 7 per thousand in the South Bronx neighborhoods in which much of this book takes place. In the same neighborhoods, hospitalizations for asthmatic children were fourteen times as high as in the wealthy East Side of Manhattan by 1995, while the rate of death from asthma for people in the Bronx was nearly nine times higher than in Staten Island, which is the whitest borough of New York. See
City Limits
, April 1998. Also see “Poverty, Race, and Hospitalization for Childhood Asthma” in
American Journal of Public Health
, Vol. 78, No. 7 (July 1988); “Inner-city Asthma,”
Chest
, June 1992; “Variations in Asthma Hospitalization and Deaths in New York City,”
American Journal of Public
Health
, Vol. 82, No. 1 (January 1992);
Newsday
, October 10, 1993;
New York Times
, October 10, 1993.

11
POOR CONDITIONS, NEEDLESS DEATHS, LOSS OF ACCREDITATION AT
L
INCOLN HOSPITAL
:
New York Times
, October 28, 1988. For more discussion of conditions at this and other public hospitals in New York City, see
New York Times
, October 7 and 11, 1986; April 7, 1991; May 6 and September 23, 1994; March 5, 6, 7, 1995;
Healthweek
, November 1, 1991. Also see my book
Amazing Grace
(New York: Crown, 1995).

  
1
PRINCE GEORGE HOTEL OWNERSHIP
: According to information I was given at the time by the Coalition for the Homeless, the family that owned the Martinique Hotel owned the Prince George Hotel as well. Another source told me that Sal Tuccelli, manager of the Martinique, also claimed to have a share of ownership in the Prince George, while a third source stated that the hotel at one point was owned by South African investors. To add to the confusion, documents filed in 1985 with the New York City Register—an agency that records ownership of properties—bear the signature of a man named Monty Hundley, a general partner in a corporation to which the property apparently was leased a year or so after Vicky moved there. Hundley is known to have made a large fortune as part-owner of more than a hundred hotels, the purchase of which was financed by loans that he did not repay. In 2005 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for bank fraud (New
York Times
, April 20, 2005). For more information on the ownership of the Prince George and its surreptitious change of hands, see
Village Voice
, April 1, 1986. Also see
Rachel and Her Children
, cited above.

  
2
MARTINIQUE MANAGER’S ROLE AT THE PRINCE GEORGE
:
New York Daily News
, March 20, 1986.

  
3
ON-SITE ADMINISTRATOR OF PRINCE GEORGE HOTEL
: Kumar Singh was employed at the Prince George after having been convicted of child neglect in 1984, according to journalist Bob Herbert (New
York Daily News
, March 20, 1986). Singh’s daughter, reported Herbert, “who had been abused before, was placed in a foster home.”