Project Rebirth (11 page)

“But why do you have to go back down there?” she asked.

“You just can't leave,” was the only answer Charles could muster. He felt as if every volunteer at Ground Zero had become his brother and sister. Vicky went on to her job with the New York State Department of Health, but not before Charles urged her to use a respirator. She remembers asking him, “But what about you?” He just shrugged his shoulders and boarded the train.

Charles walked uptown, cash in pocket, to buy a pair of much-needed boots after it became clear—in his first twenty-four hours on-site—that he would need them amid all the rubble. Just moments after diving back into work, new boots gleaming in the autumn sun, a beam fell on Charles's foot and fractured his big toe. The pain shot through his spine. Blinding pain. He was offered medical treatment by a worried volunteer. “For a toe?” he asked, eyes wide. “Nah. Ain't nothing. Pain is good. It means that I'm alive.” Truth be told, the pain was too much. His swollen toe had turned black and Charles soon needed medical attention.

Back at Ground Zero after a quick visit to the hospital, Charles took a break from tough manual labor and joined a team that was dispensing clothing. He slept on the street that night with other volunteers in front of the Brooks Brothers store at One Liberty Plaza. The store's welcome mat was their only padding. The next day they were offered a change of clothes inside the store. The fancy-suited mannequins were cleared from the destruction. The building was about to be turned into a morgue.

They could hear the movement of cranes above lifting the overlaid ruins of the fallen towers with utmost caution. Dislodging any piece could cause the rest of the pile to crumble, a risk the volunteers were well aware of. Charles could feel the rubble shifting once in a while, releasing more and more dust.

That was a moment that Charles would never forget in those early days right after the attacks, when he first felt the dust filling his lungs. He turned to a fellow responder beside him and said, “We fucked!” That was a fact, and they all knew it. Charles coughed and could not clear his throat—just the beginning of the sticky feeling in his chest, like glass cutting through him with every breath.

The first responders didn't need doctors or researchers to tell them what they already knew: The dust would make them sick. And yet they could not walk away.

“They slapped us in the face!” Charles often states emphatically when asked to explain his actions on September 11. Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist with a keen eye for examining the research on the biological basis for personality traits, seems to be describing Charles when she writes, “Individuals with high levels of testosterone are more likely than other types to dash into a burning building to save a stranger, attack an armed bully with nothing but their fists, or brave a hurricane or tornado to save an abandoned dog. And when asked what prompted them to perform their act of courage, these heroes often say they were barely thinking.”

Charles, however, finds that his courage that day was in part due to his strict upbringing in the hands of a father who “did not spare the rod.” His father made him take a bold, fighting stance in the face of an attack and keep a stiff upper lip.

As a schoolboy in Harlem's St. Aloysius Catholic School, Charles would often get into fights. “Well, my father encouraged it,” he explains with some reticence. “He said, ‘I wanna make sure when you get older, you don't fear nobody,' and I fear no man.” His father also used to box, and he taught the young Charles, who then went on to box in amateur leagues during his army years.

His father's unconventional parenting style, however, sometimes went to extremes, like when Charles was sent to school wearing shorts during the freezing cold of winter. He was old and tall enough for knickers, and it wasn't that his family couldn't afford them, but he was expected to forgo momentary comfort in pursuit of larger goals, in this case his father's regimen of making strong men out of his two boys.

His younger brother sought shelter in his mother's arms. Charles's mother was from Jamaica and a long line of fierce, rebellious women. Charles realized he was not her favorite and so turned to Tana when he needed comfort or advice. Tana, after all, commanded the most respect from him. Charles had seen her slap her own son, his father, who used to whip
him.
It was clear who was at the top of the Cook hierarchy. That, and the fact that Tana always bought good, comfortable shoes for the flat-footed Charles made her the absolute best.

“The first couple of days,” Charles recounts, “until they got all the body parts that were lying around—people who had jumped from the buildings, people who had jumped from the plane—that was . . .” He pauses, trying not to reanimate the images in his mind. “It was more graphic aboveground than down in the hole.”

How many names did they have for it? The hole, the pile, Ground Zero . . . sometimes Charles just called it “9/11”—
I'm going back down to 9/11!
—as if going into a time warp, trying to find trapped survivors and bring them back to the present. During the weeks that the work was actually a rescue, the mission of the responders was crystal clear. But then the focus shifted toward recovery—of things, not people—because the people were gone. Then the rubble was shipped out to be searched through elsewhere, and access to Ground Zero was largely restricted.

But Charles was not done volunteering. Come December, he had started working directly with the victims' families through the efforts of the Red Cross. “That's when I got hooked!” he exclaims. “I became a fool for causes.” He distributed supplies and signed over checks at the Family Assistance Center, then located at Pier 94. The help he was providing felt more palpable, face to face with those in need, but so was their sorrow.

By the first week of January 2002, after 117 days of selfless giving, Charles would finally burn out emotionally. On his way back to the offices of the Red Cross, he stopped by the Port Authority to buy a meal. A 9/11 exhibit graced the hallways of the building. Hundreds upon hundreds of photographs of loved ones lost were posted over the walls. He knew they were all gone.

Images from Ground Zero that Charles managed to suppress had come rushing back to his attention: A woman's red purse lay on the floor, her driver's license inside. He wondered who had lost a daughter, and maybe a wife or a mother. What was really getting to him was how the actual people lost to this tragedy were becoming a vivid presence in his mind, as he asked himself,
Who were they? Who had they left behind?

He just lost it. Tears filled Charles's eyes. It became too personal, and he couldn't keep compartmentalizing. The past long 117 days were composed of so many painful experiences, so many bonechilling sights and sounds. Tears of deep, raw grief and pain. As the tears flowed, he resolved that he was done for a while:
I can't go there no more,
he thought.

The last time that Charles cried was a few years back, when his Tana passed away. She had asked Charles to take her to Mount Sinai Medical Center. “She wasn't feeling well,” he recalls, but he wasn't worried, since Helen Cook had made it well into her nineties despite her beer-drinking and smoking habits. Sadly, her body shut down just a couple of hours past midnight on that Thanksgiving, right after Charles left her side.

Charles has been separated from his wife for years, yet they remain good friends. She recalls the joyous times the family shared at their Brooklyn home, with Tana joining her great-grandchildren for dinner, then whipping their dad at pinochle over raucous laughter. Carol describes how Charles “loves to joke” and how when playing pinochle, “he tries to psyche the other person out.” At times like Thanksgiving, when they all get together, it is clear that Charles is cut from the same cloth as his grandmother. Most important, Carol sums up, “She gave him the love that he needed.”

Tana also gave her grandson a lot of confidence navigating the streets of Manhattan. She established her own independence when her family forced her out at the age of sixteen, pregnant with Charles's father. By the age of seven, Charles was riding the subway on his own from Harlem, picking up his younger brother Dan at school and bringing him along to visit Tana at her apartment smackdab in the Garment District, where she worked as a seamstress.

She held night jobs at times but also loved to live it up, befriending jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, at all the raucous Harlem clubs that didn't charge a cover. On occasion, she'd bring the boy too. Charles would sit by his Tana and sip his Shirley Temple. The child clung to her every expression, doting and attentive.

Charles cried inconsolably at Tana's funeral, as if he had been saving all the tears he hadn't shed for all who had passed before (both of his parents, actually). “She was a friend, not just a grandmother,” Charles explains. He did not expect Tana to ever leave his side, even at such an old age, and there was nothing that could have prepared him for that kind of grief.