Kozol Fire in the Ashes
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Fire in the Ashes
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AMONG THE POOREST CHILDREN IN AMERICA
Jonathan Kozol
CROWN PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
CHAPTER 1
The Journey Begins
Christmas Eve of 1985 was not a good time for poor women and their children to depend on public kindness or prophetic reenactments of the Christian gospel at the hands of civic and commercial leaders in New York. It was a time when opulence among the city's newly minted rich and super-rich was flaunted with an unaccustomed boldness in the face of New York City's poor and homeless people, thousands of whom were packed into decrepit, drug-infested shelters, most of which were old hotels situated in the middle of Manhattan, some of which in decades past had been places of great elegance.
One of the largest shelters was the Martinique Hotel, across the street from Macy's and one block from Fifth Avenue. In this building, 1,400 children and about 400 of their parents struggled to prevail within a miserable warren of bleak and squalid rooms that offered some, at least, protection from the cold of winter, although many rooms in which
I visited with families in the last week of December were so poorly heated that the children huddled beneath blankets in the middle of the day and some wore mittens when they slept.
I remember placing calls on freezing nights from phone booths on Sixth Avenue or Broadway trying to reach Steven Banks, a Legal Aid attorney who performed innumerable rescue actions for the families in the Martinique that year. The wind that cut across the open space of Herald Square at night was fierce, the sidewalks felt like slabs of ice, and kids and parents from the Martinique who had to venture out for milk or bread or medicines would bundle up as best they could in layers of old clothes and coats, if they did have coats, or sweatshirts with the hoods drawn tight around their chins.
Dozens of kids I knew within the building suffered from chronic colds. Many were also racked by asthma and bronchitis. Infants suffered from diarrhea. Sleepless parents suffered from depression. Mothers wept in front of me.
I had never seen destitution like this in America before. Twenty years earlier, I had taught young children in the black community of Boston and had organized slum tenants there and lived within their neighborhood and had been in many homes where rats cohabited with children in their bedrooms. But sickness, squalor, and immiseration on the scale I was observing now were virtually unknown to me.
Almost every child that I came to know that winter in the Martinique was hungry. On repeated evenings when I went to interview a family I gave up asking questions when a boy or girl would eye the denim shoulder bag I used to carry, in which I often had an apple or some cookies or a box of raisins, and would give them what I had. Sometimes I would ask if I could look into the small refrigerators that the hotel had reluctantly provided to the families. Now and
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then I'd find a loaf of bread or several slices of bologna or a slice or two of pizza that had gone uneaten from the day before. Often there was nothing but a shriveled piece of fruit, a couple of jars of apple sauce, a tin of peanut butter, sometimes not even that.
II continued visiting the Martinique throughout the next- two years. During that time, a play about impoverished children of the nineteenth century in Paris, called Les Miserables, opened to acclaim in the theater district of New York. Some of the more enterprising children in the Martinique would walk the twelve or fifteen blocks between the hotel and the theater district in late afternoons or evenings to panhandle in the streets around the theater or in front of restaurants nearby. Homeless women did this too, as well as many of the homeless men, some alcoholics and some mentally unwell, who slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks and in doorways of the buildings in the area.
The presence of these homeless people was not welcomed by the theater owners. People were paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children of another era. The last thing that they wanted was to come out of the theater at the end and be obliged to see real children begging on the sidewalk right in front of them.
In the closed system that Kozol writes about, he discusses how rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply. Within a certain area, the is the expectation of criminal activity, poverty, etc. that has been pushed out of the, for example, theater district of New York and into other areas. The irony is that those within the theater district are, as Kozol writes, “paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children of another era”. The harsh reality of seeing children begging outside of the theater became too real of an experience for the owners, local businesses, and patrons. These two components intertwine together to reiterate a theme we have discussed in class – out of sight out of mind. People want to have the choice of paying to watch the misery of “children of another era” without having to face the reality that there is suffering and struggling right outside. If there is the pushing away of the realities that certain neighborhoods, communities, and individuals face, then how can change be made to help these communities and the people within them?
I completely agree with what you are saying. While The Wire is pretty realistic in its representations of urban poverty, the failing education system and The Game in general, because it is a television show, its middle class audience is able to convince itself that the problems presented in the series are an exaggeration of true events. Additionally, because most of The Wire’s viewers are from the middle and upper classes, they have never come face-to-face with the issues presented in The Wire. This makes it easy for the audience to turn a blind eye and pretend like the problems do not exist. I think viewers also feel like they do not have to aid people in urban areas because they do not believe they are directly accountable for the problems in those areas.
As far as your question goes, I think the best way for change to reach these communities is through programs in which individuals from problem areas are given a public voice and are able to talk about the issues that exist in areas like Baltimore. I also think that some sort of program where inner-city children can interact with non inner-city children would raise more awareness about urban issues (debatable if parents would allow this to happen though). I believe that change can only be achieved if those with the access to resources are somehow able to connect personally to the problems in those areas. They either need to be moved emotionally enough to act or feel like helping those communities will be beneficial to them and their families in some way. Maybe some sort of incentive program would work better? Any other ideas?
The Wire is based in reality, but it ultimately is a piece of entertainment media. Because of the nature of The Wire as a television show, I think viewers have a hard time extrapolating the events on The Wire into real life because many of the issues are presented side by side with typical television tropes. As much as we want to treat The Wire as an ethnography of urban culture, the show must still be scripted so that the characters are compelling and exciting.
Another thing you talked about was Out of Site, Out of Mind. For my group’s video project, we are analyzing capitalism in The Wire. We’ve found an interview with David Simon that reveals some of the negative aspects of this system. Essentially, once an individual can no longer contribute value in a capitalistic sense, they are pushed to the fringes of society. This is the case with many inner city blacks as well as the dock workers in season 2; helping these people does not provide middle and upper class people with monetary benefits. This lack of social responsibility, Simon claims, is one of the fatal drawbacks of the capitalist system. In this sense, Out of Site, Out of Mind, represents a cultural trend that is the result of an indiscriminate drive for wealth.
With the emergence of SNL and the Today Show, as a way to inform the general public, we see the use of entertainment, political cynicism and media cynicism. Although this is a very different approach to informing the public, there are people who are inclined to watch these programs, because they are entertaining. The Wire is ultimately entertainment so it does entertain, but I agree with Raymond when he says people have difficulty extrapolating the events on The Wire into real life. The Wire, like SNL, is an unconventional way to inform but it does inform nevertheless. I think this parallels the theme presented by the original commenter, Turner, “out of sight—out of mind.” People like things sugar-coated and shy away from the truth, especially when the truth is uncomfortable. And people absolutely don’t like to get their hands dirty if they feel the dirt does not directly affect them.
The problem was resolved to some degree when police and private guards employed by local businesses developed strategies for cleaning out the homeless-sanitation terms like "cleaning out" were used without embarrassmentfrom the streets around the theaters. Meanwhile, on the East Side of Manhattan, another group of business leaders went a little further by employing people in the homeless population to drive out other homeless people from Grand Central Station, where they had been taking refuge from the cold for several years by sleeping in the station's waiting
The issue of poverty is never going to go away, and there are always going to be poor, homeless people in city streets. That is the nature of capitalism and our economy. It is not a problem unique to American streets, however unfortunate it is. That being said, there are ways to help solve the problem, and others that just make it worse, some ethical, some unethical. Reading about there were people hired to “clean out” the areas in front of the theatre seems somewhat unethical to me, treating these people like rats and not like humans. I think that rather than hiring guards and security to clean these homeless people out of the way, that money and those resources could be much better used to feed these people, or even build or improve a shelter. Hypothetically, if it would take $100 to hire security to push all of these beggars away for the night, I think that $100 would be better spent buying soup and bread, or blankets for these people. If you were to supply them with help in a location away from the theatre, then they would migrate to the area in which help is being offered. By doing that, you effectively kill two birds with one stone, getting the people away from the theatre and more importantly, feeding them and giving them valuable supplies.
We don’t kill two birds with one stone because we don’t care about the poor. (We as in society) The poor are reflected as rats and roaches and no one wants to deal with these filth infested creatures. Inner city poverty is seen through the eyes of disgust and pity. People who do not have to live in these areas tend to not be able to put themselves in the shoes of the poor. I feel that this is the mane reason for the hiring of guards to push the poor away from the theater. Instead of figuring a way to help the poor, their first instinct is to throw away the trash, or push the pests away. Our society does not condition us to put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate. Instead we are taught to ignore the faults and focus on the positives. This also contributes to the glorification and admiration of the poor in Hollywood movies, when right outside the theater faces present day poverty.
I think the root of this problem of disregarding poor people as filth also goes back to what we’ve talked about multiple times with the tendency of many people to default their expectations to Horatio Alger-type storylines rather than forcing themselves to perform the more mentally challenging work of recognizing where privilege exists and where it doesn’t. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that a large number of people today still hold true to the idea that if they can make it so can anyone else, when all available evidence points to the contrary. While I know being aware of that fact could be a privilege of education in and of itself, there are many well-educated and high-profile people in America who cling to this ideal of the exception rather than the rule. As cynical as it may be, I don’t think there’s any real hope of convincing people that their company’s money should be spent helping the poor rather than simply pushing them away unless they first understand that poverty is not a choice nor a generalizable punishment for personal shortcomings – while I’m sure there are individuals who lose their jobs/homes/etc due to laziness or ineptitude, that’s not the norm throughout the country, or even on the East Side of Manhattan.
room_g
The ultimate solution, which required the removal of these homeless families from the midtown sections of Manhattan altogether, took a few more years to carry out successfully. In the interim, despite the efforts of the theater owners, many of the older children from the Martinique would manage to slip past the hired guards or the police and walk up to theater-goers, who would sometimes hand them a few dollars.
The younger children from the Martinique, however, did their begging for the most part close to home within the blocks surrounding the hotel, where they would run into the streets when drivers slowed their cars as the lights were changing and where a driver whose compassion overcame his irritation might roll down his window far enough to give the kids some money. Those who were inclined to castigate the parents of these children for letting them go out into the streets at night might have relented somewhat if they understood how rapidly the competence of many of these parents had come to be eroded by the harshness of conditions in that building.
Scenarios of broken will and loss of good decisionmaking skills were apparent everywhere. Some of the parents were emotionally ill when they arrived here; but those who weren't would frequently succumb to the pervasive atmosphere of insecurity and high anxiety that suffused the filthy corridors and crowded living spaces of the Martinique. Many who had not used drugs before this time became drug users in a setting in which heroin and crack cocaine were readily available. (The sixteenth floor of the Martinique Hotel-there were seventeen floors in all, but the top two were unoccupied-was operated, with the knowledge and, apparently, cooperation of some of the guards, as an open market for drug users.) A number of people became HIV-infected under these conditions, although in 1985 the
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term was not yet widely recognized among some of the residents and many did not understand exactly why it was that they were growing ill.
The conditions under which these people had to live
were not unknown to New York City's social service system or to its political administration. Anybody who was able to get past the guards, as I did repeatedly with the cooperation of two sympathetic social workers who enabled me to get into the upper floors and visit families pretty much at will, could not avoid, unless he closed his eyes, the sight of overflowing garbage piled in the landings and of children who, for lack of other options, played amidst that garbage.
But physical unhealthiness, the prevalence of drug addiction, and the documented presence of widely known carcinogens (open containers of asbestos, for example, and asbestos-coated pipes in the lobby of the building) were not the worst of the destructive forces children and their families had to undergo. The Martinique, as I was forced to recognize when the social workers started talking candidly to me during the months to come, was not merely a despairing place, diseased and dangerous for those who had no choice but to remain there; it also was a place of flagrant and straightforward criminality on the part of management and ownership. A young man with a raw, salacious smile, to whom the social workers made it a special point to introduce me and who, they told me, was a relative of one of the two owners of the building, used the power he was thus afforded to induce young women to provide him with erotic favors in exchange for items that they needed, such as cribs and linens for their children.
This sentence immediately got me thinking back to Seasons 1 & 2, as the Martinique is strikingly similar to “The Towers.” Oftentimes when we have been discussing urban poverty in class, we focus on either poor living conditions (in terms of socioeconomic status) or criminality (thought of mainly in terms of code, violence, and power). However, the intersection of these living conditions and the resulting criminality is crucial and demonstrates the way in which the criminal aspect—and for that matter, class itself—reproduces itself. The Towers were a problem for the Baltimore Police that were eventually destroyed because they could not be effectively controlled. What other alternatives are there? How could living conditions be improved in such unfortunate spaces? Rather than simply locking up drug users and overcrowding prisons, how might institutions reorganize themselves to break this cycle of destitution leading to criminal activity?
The first thing that needs to happen is that the city needs to understand the area and the people that come from the area. In the show, the only people from the city that we see in The Towers were the police. Those that lived in The Towers did not take well to the police at all. I believe that they should try something different. In “Hamsterdam,” they had the informational booths and health people who saw results and thought they were getting through to the drug dealers. If they tried to change The Towers that way, instead of sending officers, who the people wanted no part of and it is breaking the code to even talk to them, the people might have been more open to speaking and more susceptible to change.
This section is tough to read, and it is extremely unneccesary and unfortunate that this occurred. In areas where there is massive poverty, and the population is desperate for help, it does not take much for people with money to start flaunting power. These sorts of advancements are never humane, but I think it is a big measure of poverty when people succumb to this type of pressure. The life is a downward spiral, and it is near impossible to rebound. These woman become dependent on these terrible owners for their basic living necessities, and then cannot escape the cycle, because when they try, they get cut off from their food and supplies and life just gets worse. It is unfortunate that there are people out there doing this, and it is one of the glaring issues with poverty that hopefully can be fixed.
This scenario is truly saddening. This man of power uses women for sexual acts and provides them with the bare necessities. The worst part about this is that the women need these bare necessities so badly that they let this man degrade them. Actions such as this create an endless cycle of depression and regret leading women to drugs and other negative side effects. This power hungry mentality makes me sick.
I completely agree with the sickening and saddening scenario that is laid out for the readers regarding what many women experience in order to gain, as O’Shea says, the bare necessities. The worst part, to me, is that many of these women are not letting the men degrade them or becoming increasingly dependent on these terrible owners to help themselves; rather, it is usually to give their children the chance at something better than they have. It is no longer about them – these women are making sure that they are able to give their children more than they have and give them a chance where many see the world through the mentality that it is too late for them.
This paragraph stood out to me the most because of how horrifying it was to even think of. This flaunting of his power is completely unnecessary and degrading. And the fact that people go around and “boast about it” seems even worse to the women that were unfortunate enough to come in to contact with him. I could never even think of this for some man to do. To make things even sound worse, women are forced to perform sexual favors in exchange for the bare necessities as O’Shea had explained. Sexual abuse as Rose stated seems to be all over the place in our society. The wire seems to show sexual abuse but not in much detail and skips around the horrifying parts that we know in society are real.
There have been multiple studies and scholarly works exploring the connection between poverty and sexual violence. The poor are too often caught in situations where they are trading sexual favors for goods. They are also most likely unconnected to resources that could help them safely report instances of sexual abuse (plus the “no snitching” culture). However, like we discussed in class about rape and women, the topic of sexual abuse of minors is not explored openly in the Wire. It is insinuated that Michael is abused by Bug’s dad, but like the issue of rape on the show, the issue of sexual abuse never gains much attention. I believe that although sexual abuse targeting the vulnerable (poor people, children, etc), does happen a lot within poverty-stricken communities, it happens within every social structure within America. We learned that a wealthy white Penn State football coach sexually abuse younger children from low-income backgrounds. We saw teens in Steubenville take advantage of a drunk female peer. We have heard of Catholic priests molesting children. Sexual abuse happens within and between many social spheres and that is a reason why we feel uncomfortable about the subject. There’s a stigma surrounding the topic, and about discussing it openly. It seems as if the Wire handles the issue of sexual abuse of minors very similarly to how it handles the issue of women/rape: it hints at its occurrence but does not explore the topic in depth at all.
"He boasts about it," one of the two social workers told me. "He describes it to us openly, and gleefully. He goes into considerable detail. ... " Some of the guards, the social worker said, took advantage of the younger mothers too, as
one of those mothers, a smart and savvy woman who told me she had had to fight off their advances, reported to me at the time and has repeated since.
There was no need for secrecy, it seemed, because there was a sense that this was "a closed system," where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply. Complaint or protest would have no effect except to prompt the guards or manager to punish the complaining woman by denying her essential services or else, if the manager so wished, by calling the police and charging her with one of many forms of misbehavior that were common in a building in which almost every person had to break some rule or operate some petty scam in order to survive.
Because criminality and poverty have become the norm in these areas, everyone is aware that these activities are going on. These things are readily apparent to those who walk through, as long as they are able to gain access to the area. In the apartment buildings that Kozol describes, crime was visible as soon as he was able to get into the building. It might occur behind closed doors, but it is obvious what is going on.
In much the same way, students at Harper High School do not see the need to hide their gang affiliations from administration officials. They talked openly with the assistant principal about what other gangs they had beefs with and where their gangs operated. This American Life highlighted the fact that these gang affiliations were literally marked on the landscape. Someone who lives in a certain area is just assumed to belong to a certain gang.
The administrators know so much about the crime landscape around Harper High are able to do so because they have trusting relationships with their students. In Kozol’s article, he learns about these communities because there are poor people with whom he has close relationships and who trust his discretion. The police department on The Wire sometimes struggles to get reliable insider information because they have not built these relationships. Without confidential informants, it is impossible to get reliable information. Even if the crime is out in the open, it takes closer relationships to dig deeper into it.
I agree with your claim that in The Wire the BPD struggles to obtain reliable insider information. However, I think the question really becomes how police departments should and do build and maintain certain relationship with their confidential informants (CI). From watching The Wire, I think the biggest problem regarding a police department’s ability to get insider information is the type of relationship that the BPD has with their CIs. As clearly demonstrated in The Wire, the BPD views these types of relationships as one-sided. Put simply, the BPD relies on the CI when they need or want them and often, this type of relationship is not reciprocated. Although they do help Bubbles out when he gets in trouble and they do give him a few dollars here and there, but when Bubbles truly needs the BPD to help with his bullying problem, Carver does not return the favor.
Although I do not know if this type of relationship is the norm for real police departments and their CIs, but I can definitely see it being the case. CI’s are crucial to solving cases and obtaining reliable information, and often, CI’s provide the only lead or information that police departments have. The question then becomes, how should police departments foster these relationships with CIs to obtain better information, especially with the limited resources of many police departments?
This “closed system” operation and Anthony’s comments bring up the enabling culture which plagues the entire socioeconomic spectrum. Society has a tendency to turn a blind eye towards issues which either appear too daunting to take on or those issues which they feel are not worth their time or energy. By acknowledging this “closed system” and consequentially enabling the behavior that occurs within the system, society frames itself as hypocritical. Society, and more specifically governing officials, are quick to place the entity of the blame on those who participate in illegal activity however, they deserve equal amounts of blame for perpetuating and enabling the issues at hand.
With respect to Anthony’s comments on informants and The Wire, as we have discussed, the struggle to find informants is a direct result of “snitching” culture. However, in the case of Bubbles I find it intriguing that, from as far as I know, he never gets tagged a snitch. I doubt Bubble’s behavior and relationship with the cops had gone unnoticed in the community yet he was never persecuted in the same manner that Randy was for a significantly lesser snitching offense.
Cooking, for example, was officially prohibited because of fire dangers, but the city's meager allocation of subsistence funds to purchase food made it unthinkable to buy it from a restaurant and forced the mothers in the Martinique to cook their children's meals in secret, then conceal their hot plates when inspectors from the city came around. The management cooperated with the tenants by providing them with garbage bags to cover up the hot plates on inspection days while, at the same time, it pretended not to know that this was going on. When mothers were reluctant to provide the guards who were hired to protect them with the favors they expected, the guards could use the cooking scam or other scams much like it as a way to break down their resistance.
Kozol’s article has highlighted multiple examples of rampant corruption and scheming present within the inner city. It goes to show that no one single solution can solve all the problems that feed into poverty and violence. Even officials in charge of protecting inner city children, women, etc are corrupted, it is a never ending cycle. The Wire explores how these institutional failures plague the inner city and truly only touch those in poverty and caught up in the drug scene. However is it fair to say that corruption has the same effects on middle, upper-class individuals? Can middle, upper class maintain a life within this corruption, while lower classes succumb to it?
Poorer individuals definitely face this type of corruption in a more harmful way than those in the middle and upper classes. Kozol explains the fact that poorer mothers are taken advantage of when they are unable to afford the types of bribes necessary to appease the guards. Families with more money would not face these types of issues, causing the poorer mothers to face such corruption on a disproportionate level. In addition, Kozol mentions that younger children develop particular feelings towards authority figures after such incidents. Since poorer families tend to stay poor, it is likely that the mothers of these children had developed the same types of attitudes during their own childhood, leading to a perception of authority figures that may even make them more susceptible to being taken advantage of. Does the perception of authority figures vary by class? In what other ways does this serve to reproduce inequality?
I think it’s important to note that many of the attitudes of these people in the lower income locations have developed their attitudes towards everything based on their surroundings and families. Lower income families have been lower income for generations. There is a cycle that the parents pass on to their kids with each new generation and with that the attitudes that they have towards their situations, toward the authorities, towards the politicians who have not fixed their problem for years and towards each other. This is everywhere in the The Wire season 4. Just watch all the families and how they work. From Michael and his mother to Weebay family.
This whole paragraph made me think about the question of human nature and corruption and the role those two things play in The Wire. Throughout the series we see where institutions like the government and the education system fail and are corrupt. We also constantly see where individuals take advantage of other individuals or kill those that get in their way.
Does human nature have anything to do with the bad things that occur in The Wire and places like this hotel where the guards take advantage of impoverished mothers? In Evolution and Ecology I have learned that we as humans are descended from two types of monkeys, one of which was inherently violent, and we carry some of those genes today. Survival of the fittest is also a proven phenomenon based on Darwinian theory.
So basically, do you think that events that occur in The Wire and places as described in this reading as well as in the audio recording about Harper High School happen partly because of biology and evolution?
Children, of course, observed the humiliation of their mothers. The little ones, too young to go to school, might perhaps be sent out to the corridors; but most of the mothers would not dare to let them wander too far from the bedroom door. Even the kids who never witnessed these activities first-hand could not fail to be aware of them. I used to wonder what enduring influence all of this would have upon the capability of children in the building to believe in
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any kind of elemental decency in people who have power over their existence. Would they later find it hard to trust the teachers in their public schools? Would they develop an endemic wariness about investing faith in any older person of authority? Would they love their mothers all the more for having done the best they could to protect them from this nightmare, or would they harbor a resentment that their mothers were not able to avoid this situation in the
first~ace?
One of the social workers who befriended me that year,
a sensitive man who had studied early childhood development as an undergraduate at Yale, spoke of the Martinique in unsparing language as "New York City's midtown death camp for the spirits of poor children." He knew that I was Jewish and he asked me later if this choice of language had offended me. I told him it did not. I thought it was justifieTI
This was the most striking statement in Kozol’s chapters, as the Holocaust and/or genocide are generally regarded as the end-all be-all of oppression. One of the most frustrating paradoxes made especially evident though the material in this class how America allows the suffering of its own people to go largely unaddressed, while focusing is power on resources towards other nations.
In Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff describes the disastrous situation of the fire department in Detroit, a testament to the problems with how the United States allocates its money. “What I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got $150 million from the U.S. government, while Detroit got zero,” LeDuff wrote. This same issue of turning a blind eye towards domestic issues is also evident in The Wire when Daniels and the detail run into the “9/11 boys,” or anyone in the Counterterrorism Department. These people have a level of impunity because of the work they do, which unfortunately gets in the way of the domestic justice system.
While I firmly believe that genocide is the type of conflict that does necessitate intervention, I think the U.S. should focus on rebuilding its own national before pumping millions of dollars into infrastructure improvement internationally. In the “Doppelganger” NPR piece, we saw the parallels between the psychological issues of a war veteran and a young man living in the rough neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Do you think the Holocaust and the scenarios and environments illustrated in the Wire and Harper High School can be compared?
This is a nice idea, but it would necessitate the United States admitting that parts of the country are truly struggling to meet the needs of citizens. It is much easier to justify helping the poor, needy people of other countries than those who live among us. This is simply easier for the American people to wrap their heads around.
Another issue is that the national government has a lot of trouble involving itself in economic aid to local communities without being accused of intrusive government. The presence of federalism in the U.S. means that state and local governments have a certain amount of autonomy over what happens within their borders. Even if the national government comes in with the best of intentions, it is often harassed by members of the opposition political party. Especially in a time of tight budgets and economic hardship, it is very difficult to justify additional social programs. The national government is explicitly granted the power to deal with foreign countries in the Constitution, but not to deal with domestic poverty.
I agree that it’s important to help our own country in dealing with its impoverished communities and the people there. However, proportionally, our national budget does not allocate very much for foreign policy.
When Secretary of State John Kerry spoke on this very topic at UVA earlier in the semester, he said:
“When I talk about a small investment in foreign policy in the United States, I mean it. Not so long ago, someone polled the American people and asked, “How big is our international affairs budget?” Most pegged it at 25 percent of our national budget, and they thought it ought to be pared way back to ten percent of our national budget. Let me tell you, would that that were true. I’d take ten percent in a heartbeat, folks – (laughter) – because ten percent is exactly ten times greater than what we do invest in our efforts to protect America around the world.
In fact, our whole foreign policy budget is just over one percent of our national budget. Think about it a little bit. Over one percent, a little bit more, funds all of our civilian and foreign affairs efforts – every embassy, every program that saves a child from dirty drinking water, or from AIDS, or reaches out to build a village, and bring America’s values, every person. We’re not talking about pennies on the dollar; we’re talking about one penny plus a bit, on a single dollar.
….And since 95 percent of the world’s customers live outside of our country, we can’t hamstring our own ability to compete in those increasingly growing markets."
Because our economy is so globally linked these days, we have to pump money into other countries to stay afloat and succeed. However, to bring this back to our class material, I’d say that this number, the 1% of our budget, doesn’t really factor in or prevent aid from happening in this country to the people who need it. This is debatable and I have not researched it sufficiently, but I think the bottom line is that for our own country AND abroad, we simply don’t have enough money allocated to helping people, period.
Two years later, I published a book about the Martinique Hotel. It appeared first in two successive issues of The New Yorker magazine, and this, in turn, attracted interest from the other media. The Nightline television program, moderated at the time by the journalist Ted Koppel, asked me to go back into the Martinique with a camera crew and do a documentary on the families I had known. The social workers and some of the mothers helped to get the camera crew and the producer past the guards and up into the building. The camera itself was hidden in a baby carriage by one of the mothers, who rolled it through the lobby without attracting scrutiny and brought it with her on an elevator to the floor where she was living. She then accompanied us into other bedrooms whose occupants had told me they were not afraid to answer questions.
One thing that’s sort of nice about The Wire is that the stories are fictional, meaning that they do not stigmatize real people in real situations. They do not risk misrepresenting people because they do not attempt to actually represent real people. The characters are all fictional. When the media actually enters a place and shows real people in actual situations, there are much more complicated issues of privacy. There are clearly some advantages to realistic media coverage, but bringing in cameras to an area of great need can also put great strains on the individuals there.
In the podcast, three journalists from NPR spent several months at Harper High School. They overheard sensitive conversations between staff and students and were on the scene for very tense moments at the school. I have to wonder how intrusive (if at all) these journalists were to the school’s educational functioning. I also have to wonder if students or staff acted differently as a result of the presence of these reporters.
Certainly it is a good thing to shed light on tough issues like those at Harper High School and in the New York at-risk shelters. But reporting on these types of areas rarely contains a disclaimer about what methods were used for research.
Of course there exists a level of intrusion when outsiders enter a community. However, just like a new kid at school, as time goes on they become just another member of the community. I feel it is often stated by those who participate in documentaries that at a certain point they forget that the cameras or the reporters are there. That being said, those who actively participate sign themselves up to do so. I wonder under what circumstances NPR was let into the Harper High School community. Furthermore what were the consequences of this piece? Because of the students open involvement in gangs, the study innately does not remain isolated within the school. I can only imagine there was potential for repercussions outside of the immediate school community.
I think your comment highlights an important trade-off which people make when they allow reporters into their lives for any period of time. By allowing the reporters into Harper High School, the staff willingly sacrificed a large amount of privacy about their day to day affairs. However, the benefit of letting the NPR reporters into the school is that it allowed a large number of Americans to hear their story and understand the truly horrible conditions which the students at Harper High endure on a daily basis. While The Wire appears to be a credible treatment of many issues in Baltimore, one can still deny its accuracy because it is a work of fiction. On the other hand, there is no denying the reality shown in the story on Harper High School. Ultimately, I think Harper High realized that the story of their school needed to be told and the staff was willing to sacrifice their privacy to allow for that to happen.
I agree with Bert’s comment that there are indeed benefits to the intrusion of privacy in this case. In fact, just five days ago, First Lady Michelle Obama visited Harper High School and addressed the crowd about youth violence.
Last summer, I heard several news programs blast the Obamas for their lack of attention to the violence in Chicago, the city with which the couple most strongly identifies. A CNN program I watched argued that even though murder rates were skyrocketing by June 2012, The President had not made a sufficient public statement about the violence. If in-depth reporting and investigation can finally create enough of a national dialogue to attract such prominent attention, I think that the invasion of privacy is warranted. Last Wednesday, Michelle Obama even sat down with Harper students, away from news media, in an attempt to understand their perspectives on living in such an environment. The President and First Lady have become much more public about their support to quell violence in Chicago, and it is likely that media reports like the Harper High School one encourage these statements.
By the time we had finished with the final interview,
however, a guard on an upper floor had become suspicious, banged at the door, which we 'did not open, then notified the management. The manager, an unpleasant character by the
name of Sal Tuccelli who carried a pistol in an ankle holster, confronted us with several other guards and insisted that the cameramen hand over the material they had just recorded. When they refused, the manager and guards reacted in the same way they routinely did with residents who defied or disobeyed them. I was slammed against a metal wall. One of the cameramen was seriously injured. The TV producer, an unintimidated woman, removed one of her high-heel shoes and used it to defend us. By this point, the police had been alerted. The cameramen got out of the building with the video.
The Wire has made me rather cynical and therefore I wonder if this camera footage would even had an effect on viewers. Within the Wire, it was made apparent that people knew extreme poverty, violence, and drug trade was rampant, however the wire shows that some efforts are made to combat it but at the end of the day, all remains the same. Shows like the Wire, inner city documentaries, NPR segments all highlight life in the city slums, yet it all still remains the same. As more attention is brought to this issue, I feel that less is done. Its’ more talk, but no action.
Adding onto that, another (rather cynical) question I have is that even if the resources came into existence to support a real effort at changing social conditions in poor urban areas, would true widespread change really happen? Or would the underlying structural discrepancies carry on through? Like they said in the This American Life report, everyone who attends Harper high school carries an almost innate gang association due solely to the location of their mailing address. Even if Chicago city officials suddenly got the money to fix all of the underlying problems in this area – poverty, lack of access to jobs, underfunded education, prevalence of a drug culture, etc – would the gang activity between inhabitants of different city blocks and associated gun violence cease to be an issue, or would it merely be transposed to another area of social life?
It’s interesting to think of The Wire as another example of journalism that’s “all talk, no action” because I feel like that’s exactly what inspired David Simon to create The Wire in the first place. He wrote about why the drug war wasn’t working and was frustrated by the fact that even his own newspaper ignored this opinion. He translated his news coverage into television characters in order to expose the sad truth about capitalism in Baltimore City. While I don’t know all the facts on Baltimore City, I’m fairly certain there were no serious policy changes made as a result of The Wire. It would be interesting to know if David Simon’s ultimate goal was to actually motivate policy change or if he just wanted to expose the truth he found via TV entertainment instead of journalism.
I knew, of course, that journalists were not welcome in the building and that the social workers who had made my visits possible were taking risks in doing so. But until this time I had never witnessed so directly the extremes to which the management would go in the interest of concealment. It reminded me more vividly than ever that the city and the owners of the Martinique, with whom the city had contracted to sequester homeless people at a price tag of $ 8 million yearly for those 400 families, were determined to discourage any troublesome exposure of the social crime in which they were colluding.
It’s one thing for Ira Gold to say at the very beginning of “Harper High School, Part One” that his crew had been given unusual access for 5 months. It’s another to have the exclusive audio from so many private sessions that took place. So I guess for most of chapter 1 from Kozol, at least, there are not a lot of direct quotes from involved parties. Hold that in contrast to the Harper piece and the difference is amazing. But, quite frankly, I also don’t understand how the radio epic was possible. How is it that kids won’t walk home alone from school and are very selective in the groups with which they do navigate the streets, but some journalist can (allegedly) hold a microphone in front of their face and the kid opens up about every single thing in his life without anything happening? It seems ridiculous, but what I’m trying to say is that the access the radio group got seems TOO good. You’ve got the football player standing in front of their house where his friend got shot literally the day before during the pep rally. If these blocks are always watching who is conversing with whom, wouldn’t some random outsider with an audio recorder be the most obvious individual to avoid at all costs? The school administration turning on their over-the-top-positive attitudes for the media is one thing; I get that. But the kids seem smarter- they certainly know the rules because they (again, allegedly) shared them with Gold & Co. In this piece, however, these same kids don’t abide by them. So while Kozol praises social workers for taking some grand risk here, I came away from This American Life feeling like it was the subjects taking the bigger risk, and moreover, I really wonder why in the world they would be willing to do so.
I think there are two main responses two your question of how This American Life managed to get so much access to the students of Harper High School. First, I think it is worth noting that only the students who agreed to talk to the reporters ended up on the radio program. I know that is a common sense statement, but it’s worth remembering that Harper High School had a student population of 550, and only a small handful of those students were actually included in the show.
Second, and more importantly, I think that the students who did speak to the reporters probably weren’t taking a large risk by doing so. My assumption is that most people who live in these poor neighborhoods do not listen to NPR, although maybe I am wrong about that. But I have a feeling that most of these kids are not too worried about people in their community hearing them on the radio. Also, I don’t think there was anything particularly incriminating included about any particular student on the show (many of the stories were disturbing, but none of them pinned an unsolved crime on a current student).
Not even an “all due respect” before bombing my comment? Sorry I struck nerve.
But I wasn’t talking about being heard on the radio. Or the internet radio podcast or whatever this thing we listened to actually was.
I’m talking about being seen in the street. Talking into a tape recorder. To a random white man.
That’s not kosher.
And that’s why their participation is surprising. Not because the typical Chicago family is religiously huddling around their transistors at night to catch the latest exposes from their wonderful local NPR affiliate.
I’m not sure what you found offensive about my comment, I was just trying to further the discussion. You were commenting that it was surprising that the NPR reporters got such good access to Harper High School, I was giving my personal opinion of how they were able to get this access. No offense intended.
It also left me with a visceral reminder of the terror mothers and their children would experience when the guards or, more frequently, the manager would hammer at their doors early in the morning if, for example, the rental check paid by the city, through no fault of their own, had not arrived on time. "Six a.m.," one of the mothers told me. "He bangs on the door. You open up. There he is in the hallway with his gun. 'Where's your rent?'"
I am interested in this “closed system,” and I am curious as to why the guards have so much power, particularly in their ability to escape the force of the law and operate as though they are in a vacuum. Of course, they have a legal right to demand rent is paid on time, but how is it they circumvent proper protocol and maliciously attack and threaten residents? What is most intriguing is the sort of established “code” that oddly illustrates a collective agreement upon residents NOT to contact law enforcement as a means to settle these disputes. Should the residents be deemed culpable for “allowing” such behavior, or do they ultimately have little agency, essentially forced into co-opting this lifestyle and its harsh realities? What is most dispiriting is the lack of patrolling the police force issued on this living space. Ostracizing them into their own world with its own games and set of rules, does accountability fall within the evil-doers themselves, or a lack of commitment from the police force? I believe the answer is a bit of both, but where does this compromise meet, and where must one draw the line?
This is the way that one of the richest cities in the world treated the most vulnerable children in its midst a quarter century agoillhen these hotels were finally closed in 1988 and 1989, not for reasons of compassion but because of the enormous damage the visibility of so much desperation was doing to the image of the city and its elected leaders, most of the several dozen families I had come to know, all but two of whom were black or Latino, were shipped en masse into several of the most impoverished and profoundly segregated sections of the Bronx, far from the sight of tourists and the media. These were communities that already had the city's highest rates of HIV infection, the greatest concentration of drug-addicted people, of people who had serious psychiatric illnesses, women with diabetes, women with undiagnosed malignancies, and among the highest rates of pediatric asthma in the nation.
I think that it is interesting how the dozens of families were shipped en masse to the most impoverished and profoundly segregated sections of the Bronx. This is just another action taken by people of power to maintain spatial isolation and segregation. Because they were shipped as a group implies that they people who organized the shipping had some awareness or knowledge of the conditions and problems of the people in the Martinique. Instead of bringing attention and trying to improve the conditions and truly help the individuals, they just swept the problem under the rug and “fixed” the immediate problems at the Martinique by moving them to the Bronx. However, the move to the Bronx alleviated the problems at the Martinique since it was now “out of sight, out of mind” but undoubtedly these problems continued to exist in the Bronx.
At what point do officials or people of power have the responsibility to address the problems of poverty? In other words, at one point do people stop transferring and shifting the problems of impoverished people and neighborhoods onto someone else or just another area and actually attempt to fully address the problem?-Is it when poverty is so low that people are dying of hunger or when HIV becomes a rapid epidemic or when poverty is so prevalent that violence starts to expand into other neighborhoods?
The miserables, although they were no longer homeless, would continue nonetheless to live under conditions of physical and psychological adversity that were only incrementally less harmful than the ones they had endured in the preceding years. In one of the neighborhoods in which the largest numbers of the homeless were resettled, the only medical facility was a city-run institution known as Lincoln Hospital, which underwent the loss of its accreditation more than once because of errors by the staff that led to the deaths of at least a dozen patients, two of whom were infants. For the mentally unwell, psychiatriC care of the thoroughgoing kind lavishly available six subway stops away in the costly and exclusive Upper East Side of Manhattan was all but impossible to find. Children, meanwhile, many of whom had had their education interrupted or repeatedly disrupted during their homeless years, found themselves consigned to public schools that, in the absoluteness of their racial isolation, resembled those of Mississippi fifty or one hundred years beforfl
Kozol’s piece is really eye-opening because of its discussion of poverty and its effects. In particular, I found this paragraph to be interesting. One sentence in particular stuck out to me: “the miserables, although they were no longer homeless, would continue nonetheless to live under conditions of physical and psychological adversity that were only incrementally less harmful than the ones they had endured in the preceding years.” This statement really poins to the many effects that poverty can have, even once housing (albeit, poor housing) is provided. Not only was the housing poor, the medical facilities and schools were also poor. This really made me think about how difficult it must be for children in severely impoverished areas to break the mold and escape the poverty that holds them captive. How can society best aid the poor in a holistic manner? Where must we start to break the vicious cycle of poverty that afflicts so many in society?
This paragraph stuck out to me as well. When he says that homeless childrens’ education became reminiscent of Mississippi public schools fifty-one hundred years ago, I wondered why the doctors he talked about at the end of the paragraph are so much more reliable than the schools the children attended, considering both the medical facilities and the school were incredibly poor. This whole semester has covered the idea of upward mobility, but Kozol really puts it in perspective how close to impossible it is for mobility to happen when children are raised in such destitute conditions. I also find irony that psychiatric care is only accesible in the Upper East Side, because, to be blunt, I do not see how anyone in the Upper East Side can truly understand these conditions in the same way.
So this is where they sent them. And this is where I
followed them, invited by their parents to visit them on weekend afternoons or in the evenings during a school holiday, to keep alive the friendships we had formed when they were in the shelters. I went to their schools. I got to
know their teachers. I went to their churches. I got to know their pastors. I went to their hospitals, sometimes at their own request when they were ill because they thought that it might win them more attention. So I became acquainted with a number of their doctors, many of whom were selfless and devoted individuals who did everything they could to compensate for scarcities in the basic services that doctors elsewhere know they can depend upon.
I did this, off and on, for more than fifteen years. Then, beginning in 2005, I lost track of some families for a time when my father, who'd been ill for several years, entered an acute phase of his illness, and, within the same two years, both he and my mother passed away. It took another year before I could regain my sense of equilibrium. At that point I began returning to those neighborhoods again and meeting once more with the families I had known. Some of the children were still in their teenage years. Those whom I had met when they were in the Martinique were already in their twenties. We had long talks. We took long walks. Sometimes we would spend an evening having dinner in the neighborhood. When I was home we kept in touch by phone and mail, and bye-mail in the case of those who had computers. In these ways we rebuilt our friendships.
What happened to these children? What happened to their families? Some prevailed, a few triumphantly. Most survived, even at a rather modest level of survival. Others did not. This will be their story.
CHAPTER 2
Eric and His Sister
One of the nicest but most fragile people that I knew who was in the shelter system at the time when I was visiting the Martinique was a shy and gentle woman whose
Chapter 2 makes me ask myself how The Wire would have been different if we had better followed any of the children in season 4 in particular and seen a Victoria kind of character in the shelter system. This strikes me because in watching The Wire, I really didn’t give much thought to the possibility of intervention from an institution like this one. Also, the problems in the streets are so large that it seems like no external force, group, or what have you could make a substantial difference and improvement in the quality of life for kids and adults on the streets. Furthermore, since so many of the institutions in the show are portrayed as being filled with flaws, the shelter system doesn’t seem all that promising. As proof of this statement, we see briefly in season 4 when one of the boys must go to a shelter, and the other kids threaten and bully him for being a “snitch.” Despite potential to become a safe haven or refuge, these scenes at the shelter appear to tell us there really is no safe place.
From what you learned in this reading, how would have including more about the shelter system changed our viewing of The Wire? Would the creators likely have turned it into another corrupt/imperfect institution?
The Wire tells the store of institutional corruption and flaw through individual stories. Individual outreach and assistance can be quite effective, as is seen in the case of Namond (though it can cut two ways, with Bodie losing his life and Randy losing his connection to “life” by being singled out to help), but this is not the story David Simon wants to or thinks should be told about urban poverty and its effect on the youth there. The story he would have told is one of societal assistance, and he tells it in part with Randy (though that could be a show unto itself, hence his continued focus on other aspects of the show). This story is not a happy one of escape, not one that offers any promise. This is the story of a system that has failed to provide adequate support, incentive and resources (read:environment) to inner-city youth to allow them to improve their lives and advance in a society which has increasingly left them behind. The valedictorian of Harper High School does not leave his home. Ever. That is the only safe environment for him. He has no friends, because the environment is not conducive to being friends with a kid who “advances.” David Simon would revel in the opportunity to make a show about Harper High school and the challenges Deonte (valedictorian) faces in trying to succeed in such an oppressive environment.
name was Victoria.
Vicky had been shunted through a number of the shel-
ters from 1984 until the end of 1989. Her longest stay was in a place known as the Prince George Hotel on West 28th Street, four blocks from the Martinique.
When she came into the shelters, Vicky had been
suffering from clinical depression and periodic seizures, for which she had been treated at a hospital on Roosevelt Island, which is in the midst of the East River. Her husband, who was caring for their children at the time, had not been well for .many years, the consequence of a degenerative illness that, as best I understood, he had contracted as a young man growing up in Georgia. He passed away a short time after Vicky came out of the hospital.
At this juncture in her life, with no money in her pocket, and no prospects of a job, and with two young children who had no one else to care for them, she began to make her way into the less-than-friendly channels of the shelter apparatus, moving at first, as was the case with all homeless families, from one so-called "short-term shelter" to the next. The psychological and physical exhaustion families underwent when they were moving constantly tended to have a predictable effect. It undermined whatever capability for good clear-headed thinking might still exist within the spirits of the stronger women while, in the case of those like Vicky who were not strong at all, it simply added to their pre-existent instability.
Vicky, as she told me later, fell into a "zombie-like"
condition-she felt, she said, "like I was walkin' in my sleep"-a condition that continued when she was living on a "permanent placement," as the city termed it, in a room at
the Prince George.
The building, which was owned at the time that Vicky
moved there by one of the two owners of the Martiniqueit was later taken over by another owner with a record of illegal operations who subsequently served a lengthy term in prison for defrauding creditors of $100 million-was less depressing physically, at least on the lobby floor, than was the Martinique, but it made its claim to notoriety for other reasons of its own. Although the manager of the Martinique had some degree of governance over the Prince George as well, the day-to-day administrator was a man who'd been convicted of abusing his own daughter, beating her and leaving her locked up at home, "alone and without food," according to the New York Daily News. His daughter had been taken from him by the city to protect her from additiona I endangerment.
The city, wrote the columnist Bob Herbert, who was
then a writer for the Daily News, "takes one child out of [his] care and then hands him over 1,000 more." There were at least 1,200 children in the Prince George at the time.
Children were endangered in other ways as well.
Fires kept on breaking out-at one point, four or five times in a week. A three-year-old was burned to death while Vicky's family lived there. The fires were alleged to have been caused by arson, but tenants told me some of them resulted from the carelessness of drug abusers who were cooking crack cocaine right there in their bedrooms-a not-uncommon practice in those days when crack was just emerging as a drug of choice among the very poor.
This, then, is the setting in which Vicky and her children found themselves at a time when Vicky was already ill and loaded with anxiety. Her daughter, who was named Lisette and was only seven when all of this began, suffered less than did her brother, Eric, who was four years older. As in the case of many of the other children in the building who were nearing adolescence, he was very much aware of the sordidness of his surroundings, the unscrupulous behavior of the governing officials, the open market for narcotics, as well as the various semi-legal or illegal strategies other children of his age had inventively developed in order to pick up a little money that they sometimes, but not always, used to help their families. It would be another four years from the time that Vicky'S family came into this building
until the day when they got out.
When I met Vicky and her children in the Bronx in 1993, they were living in Mott Haven, which was then, and remains today, the single poorest neighborhood in the poor-
est borough of New York.
Vicky's home, although it was on a street that was a
well-known center for the sale of drugs-heroin, specifically-was two blocks from a church on St. Ann's Avenue,
an Episcopal church called St. Ann's, that was a place of safety for children in the neighborhood. The church, a beautiful old stone building with a tall white spire at the top of its bell tower, had a large expanse of lawn on a pleasant hillside where there were swings and slides and a sprinkler for the younger children, and a court where older kids
I think that this paragraph highlights somethings very interesting. In this particular example, Kozol describes a scene where drugs are being pushed heavily in the vicinity of a safe haven for children. The church in this example represents a place of perceived safety for the children whereas the drug selling center represents a place of controlled violence. This is just a further example of the muddy lines drawn between safe and unsafe in the urban environment. For children this is a much harder distinction to make let alone when the lines are already tenuously drawn. It is possible that this mixture of safe and unsafe in such close quarters is a large portion of the desensitization regime for urban children. This eventually leads to hardened victims of the urban life.
played basketball.
I spent a good part of the 1990s visiting St. Ann's
because it ran an excellent and innovative afterschool, in which I was able to talk at length with children and was sometimes asked to help with their tutorials. Naturally, it wasn't long before I also grew acquainted with some of their parents and with other adults who gravitated to the church for the sense of solace that they found in the inviting and informal atmosphere the pastor had created.
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 protege of a famous litigator by the name of Louis Nizer.
Even while she practiced law, Martha had been work-
ing 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 aftersch061. 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. ~ric, 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, haphazar
@cky couldn't help him much because she'd had so
little education of her ow'!9 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 "clean in' 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 stu-
dent 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 con-
sisted 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 Green-
. wich 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 per-
manent employment.
She was candid with me, and herself, in her recogni-
tion 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 no thin' 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
20
FIRE I~ THE ASHES
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
22
FIRE IN THE ASHES
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
ballerk altogether.
J.!.here'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 weI!]
I found Kozol’s reluctance to accept Dr. Edwards’s invitation to be interesting. He states that cultural defensiveness within inner-city areas can serve to reproduce racial boundaries, and can prevent people from coming in to assist in bettering the neighborhood. In addition, leaving the neighborhood for a better life is seen as traitorous, and would be looked down upon. Allegiances to specific geographic boundaries can definitely have an effect on the lives of those who live within these bounds. In the case of Harper High School, we see that geographical allegiances perpetuate violence within the surrounding Chicago neighborhoods. Can these community ties ever be seen as a positive thing? How can these ties be used to “fix” the neighborhoods instead of pushing them further towards violence and disrepair?
I think The Wire actually addresses this issue pretty well. When we understand individual characters in The Wire, we understand that majority of them fall into the street culture because it’s almost impossible not to. Communities like South Bronx, Chicago, and Baltimore that have high crime rates need more government intervention to help people to meet their basic needs early on, so that the community does not have to rely on the protection/economic benefits from a certain gang allegiance. When I say government interventions, I mean a tighter school system with a strong budget to have several full time social workers and security guards, and project housing division to provide a decent housing that allow people to feel safe and keep on working to eventually move out of the projects. I think the portrayal of the ineffective bureaucracies in The Wire is one of the biggest problems, which may hold the solution to the issue of rebuilding the community with the people of the community without pushing the poor people to the outskirts for gentrification.
Though I do agree that more money, more security and more everything from the local and state government can only help these communities grow and become less dangerous, we can’t exactly forget about the impact of those within the community. There have been institutions created ion both sides of the fence, both the legitimate system and illegitimate. Like you said, for these kids it is almost impossible not to going into the game. There is a episode in season 4 when Bunny Colvin talks about the dynamics of the school and how there are stoop kids and corner kids, pretty much the kids who are there to learn and the one’s trying to make it till they drop out. Most of these kids know how their lives will turn out, the community is the way it is because a cycle has been established and every time there is a increase in policing in the series it never seems to solve anything. The change has to be between the bureaucracy and the people simultaneously or it will not work. Plain and simple. Which means again the bureaucracy has to be willing to fix the community and the people have to be ready to support the change. But that takes a lot of cohesion and trust and I don’t think the Baltimore we see in The Wire can do that, which is why it never ends
I definitely agree with the fact that the change, to better a community and help break the cycle, has to be between officials and outside factors and the people within the community simultaneously. Providing a bigger budget and more manpower to different institutions won’t change, as pointed out by Ibukun, the mentality and attitudes that are present in a community. Pushing in money and people to try and fix or change the way people are living in a community doesn’t seem to be the most productive way because, by going into an area and telling people that they need to change or telling them how to change will result in a defensive stance. There needs to be the working together of the two parts in order to determine the actual needs, where funding can best help, etc. and, ultimately, there needs to be understanding and trust before even productive conversations can begin.
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.
"That was only about two weeks ago. Lisette came in today and said, 'Guess what? We're moving to Montana!'"
About a week later, I went to Vicky's home. I didn't want to spoil her excitement, or that of the children, but I thought I ought to tell her some of the reservations I had had ever since the first call I'd received. My concerns, 1 quickly realized, were not hers. When I told her, for example, that there wasn't likely to be more than a small number of black people in the town where she was going, she said that she already realized that.
"You're not concerned at leaving all your friends here, leaving everything you're used to?"
"I want to leave," she said.
The living room in which she slept was already filled
with shipping boxes she had gotten from the church.
"You're sure that you can handle it?"
"I won't know unless I try," she answered.
Another week went by ....
"In about two hours," Martha told me on the phone,
"Vicky and Eric and Lisette will reach their new home in Montana. Dr. Edwards had tears in his voice on the phone today when he called to check on the arrangements. The whole community seems to have gotten together to rent a house for them, and put in some furniture, and work out all the other details so that they'll feel welcome when they get there. I think that everybody knows it isn't going to be
We have spent a lot of time talking about the different institutions and social structures that have negatively affected poor, urban individuals (in the Wire and in our class readings). We have not talked about institutions that have a positive impact on these same individuals, such as the church. When reading this article, I noticed that the church seemed to be a positive influence for Vicky, Eric, and Lisette. Vicky turned to St. Ann’s when she was “in a state of desolation”. Dr. Edwards and the church helped Vicky and her family move to Montana and provided them with money, a house, counseling, etc. In Charlottesville and other cities, community outreach centers (usually with some type of religious affiliation) and churches provide food, clothing, and shelter to those who are poor and/or homeless. Is the church the one institution that helps instead of oppresses individuals living in poor urban environments?
I do believe that the church is the one structure that no matter where you go, the church is willing to accept people with open arms. Throughout my life, I have failed to hear a story of a church that has rejected her had a negative effect on a persons life. The reason I believe that this happens is because everyone has a positive image of the church, no matter if you are a person of God or not. I do not think that people are all in sync about another institution which is why it is one of a kind to help out those whom are oppressed.
Absolutely i believe the church helps with individuals living in poor urban environments. I am a Catholic and attend church every Sunday. I went to Catholic grade school and middle school and i remember how helpful the church was with the poor. Much of the money given at mass goes to the community to help the poor. I remember being in high school and about once every two weeks we had to go to the local soup kitchen and help feed the poor and also we built and fixed up many homeless shelters that were in terrible conditions and incapable of housing all of the homeless and poor individuals. I honestly believe that the church is one of the few institutions that truly tries to help homeless and poor people.
easy ....
"Vicky was up all last night. I brought her a scale so she
could weigh the packages for UPS. She told me she wanted to get her hair done but there wasn't time because the kids were so excited that they were no help to her at all.
"I think that she was happy with a kind of totally 'free' happiness I have never seen in her before. She spoke of taking up her knitting once again, and letter-writing, and she said she'd like to have a garden. She'll be forty-eight in
March.
"A neighbor of Dr. Edwards used his frequent-flier
miles to pay for the tickets, but there was some kind of glitch and we only got two tickets so I bought the third one-for Lisette. The woman at the desk gave her an upgrade to first
class!
"We had lunch at the airport. They were off at two p.m.
I think they had to change planes in Chicago."
One month later, on my answering machine: 'jonathan, this is me, Vicky. Oh yes! I'm tellin' you! I'm really here! I'm in Montana."
She left her number. I called her back as soon as I got
home.
'jonathan!" It was the first time I had ever talked with
her when she didn't need to struggle to sound cheerful.
"Have you ever eaten elk?"
"No," I said. "Are you eating elk?" "Yes!" she said.
"Where do you get it?"
''At the store."
"What's it like?"
"It tastes like steak. You broil it. Delicious!" "How are the kids?"
"They're in schoo1."
"Any problems?"
"No," she said. "Not yet."
"Any black kids in the school?" "N 0," she said, "except for them." "Does that bother them?"
"I don't think so," she replied, "because they know it
doesn't bother me."
The only thing that bothered her, she said, was walking to the store. "People here? They drive real fast. And there isn't any stoplights on this street at al1. None on the next street either, come to think of it. None on the next street after that. In fact, there isn't any stoplights anywhere in town.
"And, oh! The girl next door-Diane?-she drives me from the IGA if I got too much to carry in my arms.
26
FIRE IN THE ASHES
"I'm tellin' you! There's a lot of friendly people here! "One lady came to bring me milk and asked me, 'I don't mean no harm, but are you prejudiced?' I told her no, because I'm not. She looked at me and then the two of us began to laugh! Because-you know?-you'd think the question would have been the other way around ....
"It's like everybody wants to know: How did I ever get here? Well, I want to know that too! The only thing Dr. Edwards told me is that they was goin' to choose someone. It was something they made up their minds about."
"What's the church like?" "Made of logs."
"What's it called?" "Trinity Church."
"What denomination is it?" "Christian."
"What can you see looking out your windows?" "Mountains!" she replied. "They're on almost every
side."
"Is it snowing?"
"Only in the mountains." "What's it look like?" "Beautiful! "
"The day you got there, when you were coming off the
plane-what was it like? Was Dr. Edwards waiting?"
"Yes, he was there. Not only him. It seemed like everyone in town was there. They had their cars pulled up: twenty people, maybe more. Then Dr. Edwards took us to this house. He said, 'This will be your home.' Then he took us to the church. He said, 'This will be your church.' Then the stores began to send us food. Four stores. Each one gave us groceries: a hundred dollars from each store.
"Oh, Jonathan! It's cold here in the winter, but the
hearts of people in this town are warm."
In the first days after she arrived, she said, she had to
struggle to convince herself that she was really there. "The first night, after Dr. Edwards and his wife were gone? I told the children, 'Leave me be. I need to sit here in this chair.' I told them not to turn on no TV. It's just as well, because they only got three stations here and one of them goes off at six o'clock."
"What's the house like?"
"Oh yeah! Well, I'm in the livin' room right now. It would make up two of them that I used to have. I got two sofas. One of them's a sofa-bed. Over at the other end, there's a dining room and kitchen, which is kind of small, but they're both connected, and I got a washer and a dryer, and I got a microwave which is up above the stove. Three bedrooms. One of them is mine. Other two is down the hall. Seems like it's got everything I need."
"Where do kids there go for fun?"
"To school. McDonald's. Burger King. The IGA. To
ranches. To the church .... " "They go to ranches?"
"Me and Lisette, we went three days ago." "How did you get there?"
"Chrissy picked us up."
"Who's Chrissy?"
"One of my friends."
"Have you made many friends?" "Oh yes!"
I heard shouting in the background. "Wait a minute .... "
Then Lisette picked up the phone.
I asked her whether everything was going good at
school.
"My school is fine!" "How big is it? "Fifteen students." "In the school?"
"No! In my class."
"Are the students nice to yOU?" "Yes," she said.
"You feel okay? You're happy there?"
"I don't want to live in any other place."
In April, Vicky sent me a big envelope of pictures of the mountains, and the ranch-like house in which (hey were living, and the one-story wooden church, which looked like a log cabin. In one of the photographs there were six or seven wooden houses, very tiny, at the bottom of the photo. Above the houses, filling nine-tenths of the picture, there was a spectacular blue sky, with white and gray clouds rolling in from the distant mountains. A single tree, its slender branches reaching high. A small white pick-up truck beneath it. "Looking down the street," she'd written on the
back, "the sky goes on forever."
When I phoned her the next night, she told me she was
spending more time at the church.
"Sunday," she said, "I put my name down on the list for
Hospitality Committee."
"What does that mean?"
"You see, after the service here, we all go in and eat
our meal together. Members of the church, we take turns cookin' for each other. I wanted to make lemon cakes, because I'm good at bakin'. So I put my name down for
next Sunday."
"How's Lisette?"
"Doin' okay. Gettin' B's-but could get Ns, her teacher
says. Needs to get her papers done. Do her homework every night. They give them a lot to do. This is something new to
her."
When I asked the same thing about Eric, though, she sounded more uncertain.
"He's havin' a harder time. Missed too much back in
New York. No one here can figure out what they was doin' with him at his school. Principal says they're tryin' hard to catch him up. Dr. Edwards's talkin' with him now."
"You sound good."
"I'm feelin' good," she said, "but I still have times when
I get scared that something's goin' to go wrong .... " A few months later, at the start of June:
"I got a job."
"What are you doing?"
"Bakin' cookies, fryin' donuts-at the IGA."
"What does it pay?"
"Six dollars twenty-five." She'd started with a part-time
job at Burger King, she said, "but IGA pays better."
She said that Dr. Edwards gave the kids some spending money for a while after they arrived, "so they could do things with their friends." But they didn't need it now. Eric was working at the IGA-"couple of hours, after school." Lisette, meanwhile, was baby-sitting for their neighbors. "She put up these little cards at the IGA. People call her. Mostly weekends. Mothers say she's really good. Feeds the children. Washes them. Tells them stories. Gets them into bed. Sings them songs. If it's late they drive her home."
InJuly, we talked again. She said she still was working at the IGA. "Doin' thirty hours now. Rent here is four-fifty. Church covers two-fifty and I pay the rest. Next month I'll be payin' fifty more. Long as I get thirty hours I think I can
handle it."
She told me she had joined a group of women who
were having problems like the ones that she'd been through, some of them with alcohol, but most of them related to abusive treatment at the hands of men. "I go to meetings at the church. Tuesday nights. Fifteen women. Some are single mothers, same as me. I was scared to talk at first. I'm talkin' now. It's hard for them to make me stop."
30
FIRE IN THE ASHES
When we spoke the next time she told me that Lisette had done "something she shouldn't do" and "got herself in trouble" -not bad trouble, it turned out, but enough to worry Vicky for a time. One of the girls she knew from school had been teaching her to drive. "Kids out here," Vicky said, "they start to drive when they can reach the pedals!"
"What's the legal age?" I asked.
"I think you have to be sixteen. But this is ... something
different here! They do it anyway."
The girl who had been driving, Vicky said, banged
into another person's car. Both the girls had to go to court. "The judge gave them a scolding and he made them pay a fine. They also have to pay the owner of the car for what they did. She's been payin' from her baby-sitting money. I think she owes him fifteen dollars more."
I asked if Dr. Edwards was still visiting a lot.
"Oh yes! He's here a couple times a week. Last week all of us had the flu. He came and gave us medicine and shots."
She said that he'd been taking them on long rides out into the wilderness to see the cattle ranges and the wild animal preserves. "He's forever doing that. He loves his car. We went out with the kids this week to look at one of the
abandoned mines."
"What kind of mines?" "Gold mines!"
"How old is Dr. Edwards?"
"Seventy? Sixty? I'd say maybe sixty-five .... He's got
grandchildren who are Lisette's age. Two of them are girls."
"What does he look like?"
"He's a tall man, healthy-looking. Loves to do things
with the kids outdoors. He's got gray hair."
"Is he a religious man?"
"Oh yes. I'd say he must be a religious man. He don't
talk religion but I know that he's religious."
"How do you know?"
"You know it by the way somebody acts."
At the start of August, Martha sent me a reminder that I'd said I'd transfer money to Vicky, which we promised we would do to help her out with buying school clothes for the fall. I had a small private fund that I'd established for this purpose and for other relatively minor needs that families faced. Sometimes only a couple hundred dollars, at the moment it was needed, could help a family catch up with their rent before they got an order of eviction. For most of the families I knew in the Bronx, few of whom had bank accounts, I had grown accustomed to making wire transfers. I asked Vicky whether she would like the money sent by Western Union or if she'd prefer I send a check to Dr. Edwards, who would cash it for her.
She said I didn't need to send her money but, when I said it was a promise we had made, she said I could send the check directly to her home.
"How will you cash it?"
"I don't need to cash it yet. I'll put it in the bank." "You opened up a bank account?"
"Checking," she replied.
"How long is it since you had a bank account?"
"I never had a bank account in my entire life before.
Jonathan, I'm tellin' you! This is the first time .... "
End of summer: Vicky called to tell me that Lisette had had an accident.
"She was with her girlfriend out at someone's ranch that Dr. Edwards knows. They was runnin' with the horses and she wasn't lookin' and she ran into a hole or something that was full of water. Hurt her ankle. She's on crutches. Hoppin' around from room to room. I'll be relieved when she goes back to school.
32
FIRE IN THE ASHES
"Oh, did I tell you? Eric's got a girlfriend. Actually, he's had a lot of different girlfriends since we got here to this town. He doesn't stick with them too long. He goes through them awful fast. We came here eight months ago? I think he's had a different girl for every month since we
arrived ....
"Oh yes! Dr. Edwards had us to his house for dinner
Sunday night. He invited a friend of his, a high school principal from another town. A black school principal. There you go! He says he wants to talk with Eric more. He says that Eric needs to do a lot of work if he wants to keep up
with his class."
Her voice was strong and energized. She said that she
was working hard-"doin' forty hours now." Between her job, her meetings at the church, getting the children set for school, and keeping on top of them to clean their rooms ("Eric's room is an embarrassment," she said. "He throws his things all over the floor"), it sounded as if she didn't have a lot of time to dwell upon the past.
"Do you ever miss New York?"
"N 0," she said. "I do not. But I miss some people there.
"I was thinkin' -once I feel more settled here, I might
go back to St. Ann's. Maybe I won't tell them. Just walk in the door one day and say, 'Well, here I am!' HI do, I'd like to go by bus this time, and not by plane, because I'd like to see what's down there on the ground.
"Oh yeah! I forgot to tell you that I found my knitting
needles. My friend Diane? She took me to the mall in Bozeman and I got some beautiful blue yarn. I'm using a pattern
that my other girlfriend gave me."
"What are you making?"
"Makin' a sweater-for Lisette. Finished with one
sleeve. Workin' on the other now. This pattern's not too hard. H I have the time, I'm goin' to make a couple more of
them by Christmas."
Shy voice: 'jonathan?" "Yes," I said.
"If I made one for you, would you wear it?" "Are you kidding?"
"There you go!"
- 111-
Christmas Eve.
Vicky called to tell me that she had another job. "It's in a home for the elderly. I'm a dietary aide. It's my third job, and I hope the last one.
"I started Monday. I had to learn about the job. Then, on Tuesday, I did a double shift. Started at six-thirty, went to two o'clock. Then went back at four and worked until ten-thirty. I like old people! Some are disabled. Some have lost their memories. When I have a break, I like to sit and talk with them ....
"Lisette?" she said. "She's at the skating rink. They call it 'The Skating Palace' here. My friend Diane? She likes Lisette. She gave her ice skates as a present.
"The church gave us a Christmas tree. Members of the church came over and they helped me decorate it. Oh yeah! It's for Lisette. Not for me. I'm forty-nine years old!"
She said they still were taking rides with Dr. Edwards.
"There's a town here in Montana which is called Big Timber. Smoky skies. It's by an Indian reserve .... I love to go on rides with him. Lisette too. I told him that he takes the place of my father for me. I never seen my Daddy since I was in junior high.
"I think he's up in Billings now to see one of his
patients. He has patients all over Montana ....
34
FIRE IN THE ASHES
"Did I tell you that we have a woodstove in the living room? Oh yes! When it's cold, we heat with wood, because the gas bill gets so high. Now my friend Yolanda, who lives down the street, has been bringin' wood to us, because her mother's got a truck. It's piled out there in the porch so we
can keep it dry."
Lisette was fourteen by now and continued to do well
in school. Dr. Edwards's granddaughters were her closest friends. In the spring, however, Dr. Edwards told me that the three of them had gotten into trouble. "They were apprehended at the mall in Bozeman. Shoplifting," he reported. "In fairness, I do not condemn Lisette as harshly as the others." It had been his granddaughter, the oldest of the two, who had been "the instigator," he believed. "They were given public service to perform. Lisette will do her service at an animal reserve.
"I'm confident that she'll come out of this okay. She's a
loving girl, so boisterous and warm! And she accepts affection easily. My wife and I take her out to dinner when we can. We took her out a week ago after the court hearing. My wife is very fond of her. She hugs us both a lot."
Eric, on the other hand, was a source of more and more concern to him. "When I told him what had happened to Lisette, his response was awful cold. To quote him: 'I don't see why I should care.' I've spent more time with him than with Lisette. His grades at school are really bad. I'm taking him to Bozeman with me once a week for a tutorial in reading that a friend of mine arranged. So we have a chance to talk, to the degree that he will open up to me at all.
"I told him that I have to make a trip out to Seattle in the summer and I said that I'd enjoy it very much if he'd like to come with me. We could camp out on the way, on the Columbia River. I told him we could do some rafting.
But he was not responsive."
During the summer, Lisette managed to get into minor troubles once again, "nothing bad," Dr. Edwards said, "but I talked about this with her principal and we struck on an
idea."
There was, he said, "an excellent program" for students
of her age-"takes place in Yellowstone .... Three months long. Counseling and leadership, and learning to mark trails. Learning about conservation right there in the wild. They don't indulge them. There's a firmness that is always ready to exert itself if a student pushes things too far."
His hope, he said, was to "catch" Lisette before the minor troubles she'd been getting into grew into much bigger ones. He said he believed, as did her principal and teachers, that she was a gifted child and could do honors work in high school and go on to college, but only if she gained a stronger sense of self-control-and, he added, "of self-understanding." He said that she did not object to his suggestion. "In fact," he added, "she became excited at the thought of going out there in the wilderness."
It proved to be a good idea, as I gathered from a letter Lisette wrote to me from Yellowstone, maybe six weeks
later.
"DearJonathan,
"Hi! Hello! It's Lisette here. I am in the woods right
now. I'm here for three months. Clearing trails .... Cool,
huh?"
It was a short note. She didn't give me many details. "I
hope that everything is going good for you," she ended in her neat and curly schoolgirl printing. "Please write back.
Love, Lisette."
Two weeks later, I got another optimistic note from Dr.
Edwards. "The big news: Lisette has been doing extremely well at Yellowstone." He and Vicky and his wife, he said, had had "the great experience" of going out to see her when
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FIRE I;.J THE ASHES
the students' parents were allowed to visit after they had been there in the wilderness two months. "I'd have given a hundred bucks for you to be there with us."
At the end of the day, he said, "we all sat in a circle.
Lisette and the other kids talked about the parts of the experience that mattered most to them. Lots of tears and hugs among the kids and counselors. She comes home in one more month. Here's some pictures of her that I know
you'll like."
In one of the pictures, Lisette was running with a
bunch of other kids across a grove of trees. The branches, covered with thick foliage, were hanging almost to the ground. In another, a close-up, she was wearing something like an army jacket and a woolen hat that was pulled down to her forehead and was smiling brightly, with a look of mischief, right into the camera. On the back of the picture Dr. Edwards wrote, "When they came back from the woods, Lisette told us, 'I feel like one dirty bird.' They wash themselves and their clothes in cold lakes and streams-no soap!
But she's a happy camper."
The news continued to be good after she returned to
school. "She's really blossoming," Dr. Edwards told me. "Doing honors, getting Ns, and the school by reputation is one of the best ones in the area. She's popular among the other students, does cheerleading, sings in the choir. But
she's careful about boys .... "
The news about her brother was less cheerful. "I'm sad
to tell you he dropped out of school last week because the school will not allow a student to continue to play sports if he has failing grades, and that was just about the only thing he really seemed to care about. The school was willing to work with him and give him extra help. His teachers didn't want him to drop out. The truth is that he never gave it a
real try.
"He's repeated once already. Now he's over eighteen and has no degree and no longer has a job. He doesn't stay at home a lot. He seems to stay with different girls, until they've had enough of him. Then he crashes with Victoria. Then he's gone again.
"When I try to talk with him, he turns away his eyes.
He tells me that he'd like to join the military. But they won't accept him. They insist on a diploma. My friend, who is a principal in another district"-this was the black principal that Vicky had described-"has talked with Eric several times. He tells me that he 'closes down' and gives him almost no replies.
"So Vicky has her hands full. When Eric's home, the house becomes a hangout for a whole group of his friends and, to be quite blunt about it, not the kinds of friends I'd like to see him with. Vicky works 'til late at night, so she can't control this. And, when she's there, the boys are pretty rude to her."
The news continued to be worrisome through the fall and winter of the year. By the beginning of their third year in Montana, Vicky started falling into the depressive moods from which she used to suffer in New York. "She's deeply troubled about Eric," Dr. Edwards said. "I've put her on some mild medication and it seems to make a difference. She's been successful in her job. She tells me that she loves it. I hope that she'll keep on .... "
He wrote me six months later, in June of 1999, with another mixed report: "Lisette remains a spot of brightness in a zone of growing darkness. Eric's a loose cannon. His most recent girlfriend, with whom he's been living now for nearly half a year-the very attractive daughter of a very white truck-driver who happens to be a Christian fundamentalist-is now very pregnant." Her father, he said, "is in a frantic state and is known here as a man that you don't
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want to mess with. So Eric's in some danger, which I've cautioned him about. I've also spoken with the father."
Two months later: "The police have put a warrant out for Eric. It seems he's been involved in robberies with one of his problematic friends. I gather they've been doing this repeatedly. Amazingly, his girlfriend sticks it out with him, although it's been real stormy. 'Hurricane force' is how I would describe it. I'm surprised her father hasn't
popped him."
The racial factor, he surmised, was always in the back-
ground and, with Eric out of school, out of work, living off a girl he had made pregnant, Dr. Edwards speculated that her father "may well look at Eric as a prime example of the racial nightmare- 'irresponsible and dangerous young black man' -appearing in real life." Still, no father, he observed, even one without the slightest bit of bigotry, could be expected to be empathetic and forgiving toward a boy who put his daughter in this situation. All the father knew was that his daughter, who was Eric's age but was a student at the university by now, was living with a man who had given ample evidence that he was unprepared to be a husband that his daughter could rely upon. When he heard that Eric was arrested, he had yet another reason for
concern.
Throughout this time, Vicky and I remained in con-
tact with each other, but her letters and her phone calls had become less candid and informative than they'd been before. On a few occasions she confirmed what Dr. Edwards had been telling me, but not in full and, most often, long
after the fact.
"Eric?" she said. "He's with his girlfriend quite a lot,
but he keeps on comin' back. I cannot put him out." She said that she could not forget how hard it was for Eric when they had been homeless and before they even got into the
shelters. "We were sleeping in a friend's house. If we got there and the door was locked, we slept out in the hallway. Lisette was just a baby then. He was the one that went and asked for food at the White Castle. So I sometimes ask myself: Am I the one to blame for all the troubles that he's had? But he makes it very hard .... "
She didn't tell me yet that he'd dropped out of school.
She didn't speak about his girlfriend's pregnancy. She didn't say he'd been arrested. She didn't speak about the medication Dr. Edwards gave her. She did say, "I been prayin' for my son. I'm askin' God to help me."
When we spoke the next time, she said that she had finally made a trip back to New York but had somehow lost the will to go back to St. Ann's and had come back quickly. While she was gone, Lisette had been staying with Dr. Edwards and his wife. Eric, meanwhile, had been fighting with his girlfriend so, in Vicky'S absence, he went back into her house and, because he had no key-"I told him that I didn't want him goin' there while I was in New York"-he'd broken in with several of his friends, "messed up the place, rang up a huge bill on my phone, and robbed me of some money I had left there."
"Where is he now?"
"He's back with his girlfriend, but he comes here when he wants. If I'm at work he pries the window open."
She said that Eric's girlfriend had come to the house alone after Eric robbed her. "Yeah! She knew. She found out that he done it. So she came and told me she was sorry, and she stayed and talked with me while he was gone off somewhere with his friends. She's a sweet girl and I know she likes me and I found out quite a lot. She told me Eric isn't treatin' her the way he should. He yells at her. She says he's raised his hand to her."
This information, Vicky said, had saddened her tremendously. The thought that he had been abusive to this
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girl, who trusted him and was in love with him, "made me disappointed in my son."
It was a while after that before I heard from her again.
Her telephone was disconnected for a time because she never caught up with the bills that Eric left her. She wrote me a few letters, and in one of them she opened up more fully than before about the troubles Eric had been going through. "Got three weeks for stealing gas. It was for his girlfriend's car. He uses it whenever he likes. He goes out riding with his friends." His girlfriend was afraid of saying
no to him, she said.
She also told me that the break-ins Eric made into her
house and the wildness of the friends he brought with him were causing problems with her neighbors, and she said her landlord spoke with her about this. I was glad she was confiding in me once again, but I was worried by the growing time-lag between the news that I received from Dr. Edwards and the news that Vicky felt prepared to share with me.
The letter ended on a slightly upbeat note. "Lisette still goes to church with me. Church members taking turns to pick us up on Sundays. I'm trying to think positive.
"I'm ending this letter now. "God bless you.
"Victoria."
-IV-
Vicky had said that she was trying to "think positive."
But positive thinking, as highly recommended as it is, can be overrated as a salutary and sufficient answer to calamitous conditions that are far beyond the power of an individual to alter or control in more than small degrees. For all the efforts she had made, for all the help her neighbors gav.e
her, for all the love and loyalty Dr. Edwards never ceased to demonstrate to her and to her children, Vicky found herself unable to escape the shadow of her history.
It was Eric's uncontrollable behavior that finally brought her down. In April of 2000, after Eric once again had broken into Vicky's house with a number of his friends while she was at her job and Lisette was working late at school, the police were called by people in the neighborhood-"music blasting and loud voices," Dr. Edwards said-and Vicky was at last evicted from her home.
Although the members of the church helped her get resettled, she fell into a state of bad depression once again and, having earlier been careful about overuse of alcohola couple of beers late at night when she came home from work, maybe something stronger on the weekends when she was relaxing with a friend-she now began to drink much sooner in the day in order to subdue the feelings of foreboding that had overtaken her.
"After doing a good job at the nursing home," Dr.
Edwards wrote to me, "and having recently been given a nice raise in pay, she abruptly quit. She simply was unable to get up and out into the world and face the pressures of the day. Alcohol and antidepressant medications, as you know, can be a deadly brew. I'm going to start all over, if she'll let me, with another intervention."
In a follow-up note in May, he was more hopeful, but cautiously so. "Vicky has joined a twelve-step program. It was begun by a young physician here in Bozeman, an excellent man who, unhappily, developed an addictionto Demerol, I think-while he was in training, and is very good and sensitive with people in her situation. He's been successful with a number of my patients but in Vicky's case I have to say I've got my fingers crossed. She's fallen deep into her drinking. I don't know if she can stop." When I asked what she was living on, he said she was on welfare
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and, he thought, she might be doing part-time work when she was well enough to handle it.
It was more than seven months after that before I
heard from Vicky. Her phone had been cut off again after her eviction, but she said, "I got a new phone now." To my surprise, and a bit to my confusion, she sounded upbeat
and excited when she called.
"Oh yes! You know what I did? I took the bus to Geor-
gia and I saw my Daddy! He's seventy-four. I hadn't seen him since I was fourteen. His birthday was on Christmas Day. I made him a sweater. Same as yours, except in green.
"Did I tell you that my father's a musician? Yes! He's in a gospel choir. They were having a rehearsal on the day before I left. I said, 'Daddy, you're going to rehearsal. Would you let me come with you?' My father was so happy!"
She didn't say a word about the latest difficulties Dr.
Edwards had described. Not a mention of the job she'd given up, the twelve-step program she'd begun, the struggle she'd been going through to fight off her depression. And she said nothing this time in reference to her son. The same sense of disconnect I'd noted in our conversations from the year before left me with a great deal of uneasiness again.
In his letters, Dr. Edwards's references to Eric had become increasingly disheartening. "I've tried again and again to sit him down and talk with him, but he isn't interested, doesn't want to listen, doesn't want to tell me anything at all." He said that Eric's girlfriend had ended their relationship. He also said he had some reason to believe that Eric and his friends were "gravitating into drugs or stolen pharmaceuticals." He noted, too, that Eric was now living in his own apartment and, by all appearances, paying his own rent. So he said he had to wonder where the money
came from.
In the summer of that year-it was now 200l-he told me Vicky was no longer showing up for meetings at her twelve-step program. He also said she'd moved again, and more than once, as I discovered later. "I stopped by to visit with her just a week ago. She'd been drinking heavily. It was hard to get straight answers from her. It's as if she's sitting there just waiting for the bad news she's expecting."
Six weeks went by.
'Jonathan," Vicky said in a message on my phone.
"I have something terrible to tell you. I lost my son two days ago. Eric was shot-shot with a shotgun to his head. He would have been twenty-two this Sunday." She left me her phone number. When I called her back, her voice was blurred and breaking. "I don't know how to say this," she began. "My son has taken his own life ....
I think it’s shocking that despite all the interventions for Eric and his family, including physically removing Eric from a crime ridden/concentrated poverty environment, Eric still died in his early twenties, thousands of miles away from Bronx. Growing up homeless, living amongst the drug abusers, murders and child abusers leads to a deeply rooted trauma in kids like Eric. I think the stories of Harper High School students paint a more vivid picture of what Eric’s teenage years were like. Interviews with Jordan, who described his neighborhood as a “war zone” and Thomas, who is constantly worried that a bullet might come through his window anytime, parallel the experiences of what it must have been like growing up in the areas with long history of crime and poverty. With this level of deeply rooted trauma at young age, recovering and living a ‘normal life’ seems almost impossible. Kozol and Dr. Edwards constantly reached out to Eric, and his mom got out of her alcohol abuse, and that still did not help Eric recover. Also, Devonte eventually lost his hopes in Crystal’s counseling, and fell back to the street. If Eric could not be remediated from his post traumatic stress despite the constant support/care/stability by the community at Montana, is remediation possible?
We talked about prison as a place of remediation, but can we imagine or even expect kids like Eric and Devonte coming out of prison, or even a juvenile detention center, be equipped to live a normal life? What kind of interventions do these teenagers need, when they have already seen ‘too much’ and are now desensitized and unmotivated?
I think Lisette’s story is a perfect example of the fact that rehabilitation is possible for some individuals. It is not impossible to get out of a cycle of poverty. It is difficult to do so. Lisette had a number of mild criminal activities during her adolescence that she was gradually steered away from.
But I want to focus on what made Eric’s rehabilitation fail. He was never able to find individuals to serve as true role models. Black males of a similar age did not exist in Montana. He was brought to see a black high school principal several times, but Eric may have resented the attempt to appeal so obviously to his racial differences. Lisette could look to her mother as an image of success—at least in the first years after the move—while Eric did not have such an individual.
"Day he died, I'd called him in the mornin'. He said that he was with his friends, playin' cards and havin' fun." Then, all of a sudden, she reported, Eric sounded very scared. "'Mummy, I don't feel no good. I need your help.' I said, 'Okay. Come over here right now.'
"A few minutes later, he was at the door. He came in by his self, and then his friends came in. I didn't know why he let them come with him, but I was thinkin' they'll be gone and then he'll be alone with me. They went into another room and it was quiet for a while. Then I heard it, right behind the wall, and I went in and saw the shotgun lay in' there across the floor. There was blood all over him. It was comin' from his head ....
"N ext thing, the police was there. Police was comin' up the stairs. Then they was tryin' to revive him. Then they put him on a stretcher and they carried him downstairs and took him to the hospital, but they said I shouldn't come. But fifteen minutes after that another man from the police, he took me with him in his car and said that he would stay
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with me. Then a doctor came out from the door and he got up and spoke to him, and then he sat down next to me and held my hands and told me that my son was dead.
"He asked me was there anyone I would want to contact and I told him Dr. Edwards. But Dr. Edwards, he'd already heard. And he came in and he was there and he took me to my house. And then his wife. And other people from the church. They wouldn't let me be alone. And, after that, Lisette was there. And Dr. Edwards's wife went out-
side to talk with her."
I asked her whether anybody close to him, anyone who
cared for him, had told her that he was depressed before
she spoke with him that day.
"No one. No one knew. He just kept it in. I told Lisette
I pray from this she'll always tell me what she's feelin' when she's feelin' bad. 'Never hold it in,' I said, 'because I been there and I love you and I couldn't bear it if I lost
' "
you 00 ....
Dr. Edwards mourned for Eric like the father he had
tried to be for him. He condemned himself for never having found a way to penetrate those walls of isolation in which Eric had enclosed himself. "Starting months ago," he said, "I had my struggles about being the prime mover, asking whether everything that he was going through was somehow of my doing. I've tried to come to peace with this, but I haven't given up my questioning. It's going to be a long time, I'm afraid, before I do.
"There are some who are convinced it was a homicide.
Several of his friends, as I believe you know, had followed him into that room, and no one has explained what they were doing when that shot rang out. But the police have interviewed the boys and studied the case carefully, and all the evidence seems to confirm it was a suicide."
Again and again, he came back to the question of
t
his own responsibility. "I realized there were going to be problems from the first time Vicky opened up to me. And after she had been here for a while she confided in me more and she told me quite a lot of what the kids had undergone when they were in New York. But I overestimated the potential of a different place and different opportunities to overcome what I had hoped they'd left behind."
One of the things that intrigued me the most about Harper High School was the role that the school administration played in both reaching out to these teenagers, as well as the efforts made in preserving daily aspects of “normalcy.” For instance, the radio piece mentioned the Homecoming Dance and the importance it serves in contributing to the overall high school experience. In light of the recent violence, it was important for the faculty and administration to keep the Homecoming Dance. Furthermore, the radio program is full of interesting interviews that emphasize the relationship students have with social workers at the school. Consider Thomas, a student, an Anita, the social worker at the school. Thomas was a witness to violence that killed one of his best friends, as well as paralyzed his brother. Anita was very closed to the deceased. By sharing their grief with one another, they seemed to come together. This comment in the Kozol reading immediately sent me thinking about the aspect of mentorship that the social workers provided in school.
Weeks after Eric's death, I found that I kept coming back to what Vicky said he'd told her on the phone. "Mummy, I don't feel no good. I need your help"-and her reply, "Come over here right now." For all of the defensive toughness and aloofness others saw in him, he had spoken to his mother in that moment in the way that frightened children do. If he had only come alone and told her what he feared, might she have held him in her arms and given him the sense of safety he was asking for? Could she have been for him, in the hour when he needed it, the mother she herself had never had?
I think that this reading and the Harper High School audio recording both get the reader/listener to think about the effects that a life growing up in the streets can have on young people both mentally and physically. These children grow up immersed in violence and have painful memories that they attempt to suppress. They are also unable to express emotions the way they should when violent events occur because they are taught that they need to be strong and tough in all situations. This kind of suppression cannot be good for the well-being of the children from these poor areas. We see where Eric from Kozol’s book is extremely troubled(eventually even takes his own life) as well as Thomas from the audio recordings who has been overly exposed to violence.
Do you think there is any hope of recovery after a child has been exposed to so much trauma? Is there any way for that child to reenter society and perform as a normal functioning adult? Even if he has been physically removed from the urban setting as in Eric’s case, it seems like there has already been too much psychological damage. Thoughts?
Allyson, I believe that you bring up a very interesting point regarding the mental and emotional state of children following such exposure to violence. Although I am optimistic that a child exposed to such trauma can successfully integrate into society and perform as a normal functioning adult, I do worry about the child’s reaction to such violence. The Harper High School recording suggests the students do indeed handle their exposure to violence in harmful ways. Consider the character of Thomas, who wanted to hurt – and did hurt – someone after witnessing a murder. Allyson, I would agree that these children are (as you say) “unable to express emotions the way they should when violent events occur”. Perhaps the most startling example of this in the radio show stems from the death of Terrance Green. More than 10 other murders could be traced back to the murder of Terrance. Rather than seek another outlet for their grief, these children only perpetuated the problem. Furthermore, violent events such as this can trigger the formation of many new cliques or gangs that attempt to honor the deceased. Such groups, in my mind, can lead to the very same problem of violence.
From that time on, Dr. Edwards and those members of the church who were Vicky's closest friends did everything they could to help her and Lisette to reconstruct at least some semblance of stability. Lisette regained her footing rather quickly. She was now a senior and continued getting honors grades and was making plans to go to college. She was, Dr. Edwards said, "a mature and capable young woman" and "happily in love" with an only slightly older man, a student at the university- "a serious and decent guy by the name of Thomas who is very much in love with her as well." He said that she'd been living with him for a time, but it seemed important to him to explain that they were "married under common law" which, he wanted me to know, "is binding in Montana."
A short time later, he told me she was pregnant but he was confident that this would not prevent her graduat-
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ing high school and proceeding with her plans for higher education. "We had dinner with them, and Lisette made clear that she has no intention of returning to New York. She's looking at some colleges around Atlanta now. She and Thomas seem to have a good perspective on the choices they'll be making. As a couple, they seem very solid, very
strong."
Vicky, on the other hand, continued to be almostincon-
solable. "I went over there to visit her the other night. She told me she was drinking. But she didn't need to tell me. I could see that she was pickled when she came to the front door. I'd been told she was starting a new job, but there's no way she could have gone to work in the condition that
I saw."
I spoke with Vicky very seldom after that. Usually her
voice was faint and her words were often slurred and the little information that she chose to share with me was never very clear. Before long, there were no more messages from Vicky on my phone. I didn't know if she had moved again. The most recent number she had given me appeared to be
cut off.
In one of the final letters that he sent me, Dr. Edwards
said, "I don't see Vicky anymore, which saddens me, but she no longer seeks my company. I've tried my best to keep in touch. My wife and I drive over there from time to time, but we never find her home and the messages I leave for her
are not returned."
Eight months after Eric died, I received a very grown-up
and reflective letter from Lisette. "Since my brother was laid down to rest, my mother has been struggling. Dr. Edwards says he told you she's been drinking. She was broken by my brother's death. I love her, but I have to use my strength to
save myself.
"Thomas and I are doing our best to pay our bills and
taking good care of our daughter. We were married in a church on May 15. I graduate next week. Then we're going to move south so I can enter college in September."
She said that they had changed their plans and were looking at a town near Myrtle Beach because her husband's relatives were living in that area. Her husband had applied for transfer to a college there, which she would be attending too.
They must have moved soon after that. I wasn't sure if she received the letter I had sent her in reply. Dr. Edwards, who was well into his seventies by now, was no longer able to maintain the pace he used to keep, and he soon retired. Within another year or so, he told me he had lost all contact with Lisette and Vicky. Many years went by before I got word of them again.
It came in a phone call from South Carolina in 2009.
Lisette still had a little of that buoyant schoolgirl voice that had endeared her to so many people in her teenage years, but she was twenty-six by now, the mother of four children. With time taken off to raise the children, she was heading toward completion of her studies to become a paralegal. Her husband was completing a degree in dentistry.
Her mother, she said, had suffered greatly in her final years from pancreatic cancer. "Her social worker called me from Montana and told me she would probably not live for very long. We brought her here to stay with us. She started chemotherapy. We took her to a hospital in Charleston to receive her treatments and we thought that she was doing well, until she just stopped eating. She had lived eleven months. She died at home with our kids around her. She's buried at the cemetery with my husband's family."
In her final words she said, "I'm going to give a good life to my children. I have to do it. I'm the one who made it through. I'm a stronger person now. I guess that I was always stronger than I knew.
Lisette ends up being the success in her family, surviving her mother and brother, and ending with a decent life built for herself. Early in the article Jonathan Kozol notes that when they lived in Prince George, Lisette (7 years old) seemed far less affected than her brother who was four years her senior at the time. Even Vicky contemplated whether or not Eric had been through too much as a child when they were homeless to be able to function normally, or rebuild himself once they moved to Montana. Lisette and Eric had two drastically different ends. This leaves me wondering to what degree their four year age difference, and subsequent different degrees of exposure to extreme poverty, changed the way that they were able to function as normal adults.
We have several examples of different children at different stages in The Wire. The relationship that could (potentially) most closely mirror Eric and Lisette is Michael and Bug. Michael’s age, and therefore social environment, essentially requires him to participate in the drug game. Bug, much younger however, is only shown preoccupied with snacks and homework—- not the social pressures his older brother faces. Does this mean Bug has a significantly better shot at living a normal life? On the other hand, there is Kenard, similar in age to Bug, but already wrapped up in the game. Are these kids afforded a significantly higher chance the earlier they are removed from a ghetto? It seems that Lisette has successfully broken the extreme poverty cycle in her family, and can give a good life to her children because she has the appropriate means.
The answer to your question seems to me to be a resounding yes. The younger you get out of a ghetto, the more likely you are to be able to move past cycles of poverty and onto a more productive life. But I think the key is that you have to get out. Young people are more susceptible to the forces of their surroundings, broadly speaking, than those who are older. They are going to adapt more quickly to any change in their environment.
This is why Bunny Colvin’s school intervention research is conducted at the middle school age: the college researchers realize that high school kids are too far into the drug game to be sufficiently impacted by an intervention class. At the middle school age, there is much more of a chance to catch problems before they spiral out of control. Unfortunately, Michael slips through the cracks of his school. Because he is not loud and does not create major behavioral disruptions, he is ignored by the school’s resources. And it is the events of this season that determine whether he will move up or down socially. Unfortunately, we see his descent into more violence.
As children get older and start to be treated as adults criminally, it becomes more and more difficult to come back from committing crimes. Juvenile detention sentences become jail sentences at a certain age, largely because of the discretion of the prosecutor and the judge. This is especially true in the world of drugs, where zero-tolerance and multiple-strike policies do not allow for fresh starts. As children grow older, their rap sheets usually grow longer and the legal system is less forgiving.
I agree that the younger you get out of the ghetto, the more likely you are to avoid poverty and criminal behavior. Yet, to be able to get out of poverty at a young age requires help from someone older. Is it then, the responsibility of an older sibling to take on the responsibility to ensure that younger siblings could have the possibility of a better life? In The Wire, there are characters like Michael and Wallace who do understand the importance of helping their younger siblings get out of the streets. In the cases of Wallace and Michael, they have been better parental figures to their younger siblings than their real parents. Therefore, why do older siblings feel an obligation to their younger siblings when the parents don’t even feel that they have that same obligation?
"Please give my love to Martha when you speak to her.
And if you're ever here near Myrtle Beach we would love to have you come and visit us. We have room for you to stay. If you like, I'll take you out to see my mother's grave. I know
how much she meant to you.
"Okay? I have to go! Say a prayer for me!"
General Document Comments 0
Reflecting on the Harper High School recordings and the Kozel piece, in what way has media contributed to uplifting these two communities? Few times in our course have we examined communities like The Wire presented from the perspective of someone who lives in these surroundings. When visitors in these communities discuss the decay, violence, etc. they continue to perpetuate the stigmas surrounding these communities. I am not saying that these communities do not have issues that need to be addressed, but questioning the means by which they are examined. In an academic setting do we feel media such as the Harper High recordings assist in ending issues surrounding lower socioeconomic communities or are we contributing to the stigmas surrounding them?
I think that perhaps media coverage of phenomena such as Harper High School has become, in part, too insular. While I believe the media has (at least partially) the good intent to make society aware of a significant shortcoming, it portrays the event in a way that almost numbs viewers (that would NEVER happen in my neighborhood!). Those who have the background to understand the truth behind what they are seeing are most likely not in a position to help, themselves (again, most likely) having been trapped in the destructive cycle of urban poverty. While I understand what I read about Harper High School and see portrayed in The Wire to be true (or, at least, largely true with The Wire), I do not have the background to internalize that information; I cannot empathize with the experiences of these students because they are simply too foreign for me to process.
At this point we arrive at the inherent problem with reporting on inner-city crime; these neighborhoods/schools/corners/etc have, in fact, gotten so bad that outside viewers either tune out or numbly view without internalizing or synthesizing what they are watching. Media can report the truth of what is happening, but it will fly either under the radar of over the (empathetic) heads of viewers in a position to help (again, most likely). If they report less that the awful truth, then the viewers will process the information, then either think “it’s not that bad” or push from their minds the environment into which they have been cast because it is difficult to believe that such a place could still exist in America.
How do we balance reporting the truth with reporting something that viewers with synthesize and take action on? I don’t have that answer.
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