Poverty's Children
KOZOL, JONATHAN
Poverty's Children Growing up in the South Bronx BY JONATHAN KOZOL The Number Six train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the eighteen-minute ride between East 59th Street and...
...Ann's, where he is playing with a furry dog who sleeps outside the front door of the church except on freezing winter nights, when the Reverend Overall brings him in to sleep inside her office...
...The daughter's out at Rikers Island...
...Anthony is waiting for me at St...
...Were your parents mad at you...
...She's paralyzed...
...I ask her...
...Now we have AIDS, the great plague, the plague of AIDS, the plague that can't be cured...
...But even from the most severe of academic viewpoints about "rationality" or "good" and "bad" behaviors, what has Mrs...
...I only know that this is not His kingdom...
...Standing in front of the building, Cliffie grumbles slightly, but does not seem terribly concerned...
...He pauses, however, and pulls an asthma inhaler from his pocket, holds it to his mouth, presses it twice, and then puts it away...
...He stops at that moment and waves his hand around him at the neighborhood...
...I say, "OK...
...When she married, at the age of twenty-five, she had to choose her husband from that segregated "marriage pool," to which our social scientists sometimes quite icily refer, of frequently unemployable black men, some of whom have been involved in drugs or spent some time in prison...
...The body breaks down...
...Maybe this child knows something we haven't heard...
...That," he answers, "is something that I do not want to know...
...I mention, however, that he took me to the waste incinerator and I share with her his comment about "burning bodies...
...The phone breaks down...
...Happy at all...
...If they're dirty, I'll give them their bath...
...He reaches into the package for another cookie, only to discover they're all gone...
...Then there's lots of other people have it but don't know, afraid to know, and don't want to be tested...
...He seems to take the lessons of religion literally also...
...Munching another cookie as we walk, Cliffie asks me, "Do you want to go on Jackson Avenue...
...We walk a long block to a rutted street called Cypress Avenue...
...They can move from place to place...
...A name and date can still be read, however...
...The 600,000 people who live here and the 450,000 people who live in Washington Heights and Harlem, across the river, make up one of the largest racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our nation...
...The statement, for example, heard so often now as to assume the character of incantation, that low-income neighborhoods like the South Bronx have undergone a "breakdown of family structure" infuriates many poor women I have met, not because they think it is not true but because those who employ this phrase do so with no reference to the absolute collapse of almost every other form of life-affirming institution in the same communities...
...They wheel her outside in the summer...
...Anthony," I ask...
...They collect your story from you...
...When I ask him, "Anthony, do you have a happy life...
...Many of the kids, she says, have little bugs all over them...
...What it burns are so-called red-bag products, such as amputated limbs and fetal tissue, bedding, bandages, and syringes that are transported here from New York City hospitals...
...Been there several times...
...I would like to live to see the human race grow...
...You never know...
...What troubles does your uncle have...
...Of course the family structure breaks down in a place like the South Bronx...
...I don't even know the man," he says...
...The first time I see the pastor, Martha Overall, she is carrying a newborn baby in her arms and is surrounded by three lively and excited little girls...
...like that, with an exclamation on the word...
...She finished high school, studied bookkeeping at a secretarial college, and went to work when she was nineteen...
...At a tiny park in a vacant lot less than a block away, he points to a number of stuffed animals that are attached to the branches of a tree...
...Yes," she says, nodding at her daughter and her son-in-law...
...He says it with so much thought, and grown-up reserve, that his mother can't help smiling, even though it's not a funny statement...
...Mr...
...Many social scientists appear to hold this point of view today and argue that the largest portion of the suffering that poor people undergo has to be blamed upon their own behaviors...
...I ask Anthony...
...Plagues are never really over...
...This is a place of pain.' ror me past seven years, a gang or murderers and dealers has been based four doors away from Mrs...
...There's trashy things all over...
...This article was adapted, with permission, from Jonathan Kozol's latest book, "Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,"published by Crown...
...He doesn't answer me but smiles at the bears affectionately...
...The trouble is, you answer their questions and you give them your opinions...
...It's true...
...Men like that make everyone feel rotten...
...I've got no choice but I don't think I can go through it anymore...
...To make sure I understand how unusual this is, he says, "Nobody else can...
...She had three operations...
...Then the man there said, 'Your card is dead...
...Not many...
...He stays inside himself...
...Then, in a grown-up voice, he adds, "How can I say this...
...Sadness is one plague today...
...Did you know he lived here in the Bronx...
...he says in a spooky voice, as if enjoying the opportunity to terrify a grownup...
...Jonathan," he says again, "I don't know when...
...I have yet to figure out what she has done that was irrational...
...It could be the youngest...
...Not for one day...
...I think that she likes children more than grownups...
...When you leave, you are in the poorest...
...She gives him another pleasantly suspicious look and leans back in her chair...
...A kingdom is a place of glory...
...The spirit breaks down...
...Too frail to keep on with the second of two jobs that she had held, in all, for nearly twenty years, she was forced to turn for mercy to the city of New York...
...He lived here in a cottage with his wife...
...Why is your life like his...
...So I went back and forth from welfare to the hospital—it took a week and finally I got the letter...
...She left her husband after he began to beat her...
...Well, to tell the truth, not any who are happy for more than one day...
...But a man decides to hold a party because he is not afraid...
...Jonathan," he answers, "only God can do that...
...Cliffie, who is listening to this while leaning on his elbow like a pensive grownup, offers his tentative approval to his mother's words...
...I ask...
...I wonder at times if a sense of the dramatic might lead Anthony to overstate his answers to my questions, so I challenge him by telling him that I've met children in the schoolyard who seem cheerful...
...I ask, "How do you keep yourself composed...
...This happened last year, on the Fourth of July...
...I've seen it...
...Clumping so many people, all with the same symptoms and same problems, in one crowded place with nothing they can grow on...
...The bullet ricocheted and got her in the back...
...I wouldn't," I reply...
...Reaching up to take my hand the moment we leave the church, he starts a running commentary almost instantly, interrupting now and then to say hello to men and women on the street, dozens of whom are standing just outside the gateway to St...
...He always began a job but for some reason never finished it, which is my problem, too...
...The entire discussion of poor women and their children and their values seems to take place out of any realistic context that includes the physical surroundings of their lives...
...He goes out but he stays in...
...He has many troubles...
...No," she says, "I don't get sick of it because a lot of them have been nice people...
...Flowers speaks of one of these kids, a fourteen-year-old boy who used to live here in this building but whose mother has since died of cancer...
...Our children start to mourn themselves before their time...
...I talk to God...
...That's no lie...
...Do you know children who are happy...
...Ann's Church...
...You think, 'Good.' But nothing happens...
...When he has bad dreams, he tells me, "I go in my mommy's bed and crawl under the covers...
...It's true...
...I'm thirteen...
...She relates a story that I've heard many times from people in New York who have lost their welfare payments...
...Keeping your kids alive is bigger...
...I ask him how he knows of Edgar Allen Poe...
...Crossing beneath the elevated road, we soon arrive at Locust Avenue...
...It's over in Egypt but it could have gone to other places...
...Summer had just begun...
...I don't know why...
...How did you know that he was hungry if he couldn't talk...
...He looks up at me pleasantly...
...Some from disease...
...The place Cliffie is referring to turns out to be a waste incinerator that went into operation recently over the objections of the parents in the neighborhood...
...It used to," she replies...
...As we walk, we pass a painted memorial to a victim of gunfire that has been partly whited over in one of the periodic cleanups by the city...
...I ask him when he thinks this plague will end "or else go someplace else...
...They do...
...That's just in this section...
...Anthony, is your uncle a drug-user...
...Some of them, their relatives take them in...
...Perhaps it is partly for this reason that so much of the debate about the breakdown of the family has a note of the unreal or incomplete to many of the poorest women I know, and to many of the priests and organizers who work with them...
...I think that he's afraid to look up at the world...
...In the other building over there, there's maybe twenty more...
...No, thank you," I say...
...He thinks the plague will never come to him if he can make things very safe...
...Only it's a wishing well where wishes don't come true...
...There's a garbage dump three blocks away...
...Others go in foster care...
...I press him a bit and ask, "What is the meaning of this 'plague...
...She has a heart of gold," says this remarkable boy...
...Ann's Church, almost all of whom have relatives in prison...
...Nothing works here in my neighborhood," a mother named Elizabeth has told me...
...Mrs...
...He breaks it in half, returns half to the package, and munches on the other half as we are walking...
...I think it will only happen in the Kingdom of Heaven, but even the angels do not know when that will come...
...Why wouldn't the family break down also...
...A nurse comes once a month to take her temperature and check her heart and her blood pressure...
...I ask...
...Then there's all the trucks that come through stinking up the air, heading for the Hunts Point Market...
...I'll have to go and see a doctor...
...I feel so sorry for that child...
...Ann's, waiting for a soup kitchen to open...
...What was this plague like...
...Jonathan, my uncle is a sick man...
...Anthony, what should we do to end this plague...
...This was because he didn't want the plague to get inside...
...Despite the horrors she has seen, she seems a fearless person and almost serene...
...It's just 'there' and then it drops...
...Cancer of her fallopian tubes was detected at this time, then cancer of her uterus...
...Unlike many children I meet these days, he has an absolutely literal religious faith...
...Keeping a man is not the biggest problem...
...I ask...
...They seem to be everywhere: in the garden, in the hallways, in the kitchen, in the chapel, on the stairs...
...I enjoyed the walk...
...After she died, he had a breakdown he could never get out of...
...Truly happy...
...Why are there bears in the tree...
...Washington, I wonder, without settling for plain extermination...
...In one massacre that took place on the street two years before, a man and woman were shot dead for buying crack from the wrong dealer, the dealer was shot and killed as well, and a fourth person who had no drug involvement but was walking in the alley at the wrong time was chased down the street into St...
...I ask...
...Another brother's dead...
...But he holds his ground...
...I ask how many people in the building now have AIDS...
...Ann's Avenue is a gentle sanctuary from the terrors of the streets outside...
...I didn't...
...He does not look at people...
...It's about a plague that stalks the Earth," he says...
...I put my card in, but it didn't work...
...He has a package of cookies and removes one...
...I tell him, 'Lord, it is your work...
...That number's quite exact," I say...
...The plague of Egypt is, of course, not over...
...Jonathan, my life is like the life of Edgar Allen Poe...
...A seven-year-old boy named Cliffie, whose mother has come to the church to talk with the Reverend Overall, agrees to take me for a walk around the neighborhood...
...He looks surprised by this...
...Anthony meets me in the garden of St...
...I ask Mrs...
...Including the children, maybe twenty-seven people...
...Washington, I wonder, without settling for plain extermination...
...How old would you like to live to be...
...We have to go around this block...
...But we do not think of them that way...
...Children from the neighborhood, he says, come to her house and she makes ices for them and bakes cookies...
...There was not AIDS in those days...
...No," I say...
...I've been there...
...She tells me that her food stamps and her welfare check have been cut off...
...She speaks of toddlers in the streets who sometimes don't know where their mothers are...
...Keeping from being killed is bigger...
...As confident and grown-up as he seems in some ways, he has the round face of a baby and is scarcely more than three-and-a-half feet tall...
...When I ask him how he pictures God, he says, "He has long hair and He can walk on the deep water...
...For fifteen minutes...
...His eyes look worried when he says this...
...Before I leave, she shows me a handful of photocopied clippings from newspapers that have sent reporters here to talk with her...
...A crowd including children from a nearby junior high school watched the killing...
...Put me to rest at night and wake me in the morning.' " "Do your children have the same belief in God that you do...
...I brought in all the letters and I waited for another week and then I went to the computer...
...How can you be sure of that...
...He looks down...
...Since the time I met Mrs...
...The waste incinerator is just one more lovely way of showing their affection...
...He then launches into a brief lecture on the history of plagues...
...The incinerator, I am later reassured by the Reverend Overall, does not burn entire "bodies...
...He pointed to my pizza...
...This is the last place in New York that they should put poor children...
...He gestures down a hill toward what he calls "the bad place," and asks if I want to go see it...
...No, Anthony...
...He adds, "His wife had tuberculosis, but he loved her anyway...
...I ask him what he's read of Poe, and he replies, "The Masque of the Red Death— and many other stories...
...In 1983, at the age of thirty-nine, she landed with her children in a homeless gale shelter two blocks from Times Square, an old hotel in which the plumbing did not work and from which she and her son David and his sister had to carry buckets to a bar across the street in order to get water...
...If nothing else works, why should a marriage work...
...I'd like to live another 100 years...
...And they sealed them...
...What does he do during the day...
...In one of the most diseased and dangerous communities in any city of the Western world, the beautiful, old, stone church on St...
...Happy is not the same as cheerful," he replies...
...Do you know other children who cry...
...This out here is not God's kingdom...
...A plague is an evil in one way," he says, "but not an evil in another way, because it could have a purpose...
...Do you ever get sick of all these people knocking at your door year after year to pick your brain...
...He has AIDS...
...One hundred and thirteen...
...Although I don't know one street from another, I agree...
...Yes," he says...
...But he was too cold to move his mouth...
...The bodies of people...
...Everyone is going to be burned to crispy cookies...
...I'll keep you safe until your mamma's home.' The children know me, so they know that they don't need to be afraid...
...I ask him why he thinks that she is happy...
...The electricity and heat break down...
...She was born in 1944 in New York City...
...says a white minister who works in one of New York City's poorest neighborhoods...
...Speaking of a time his mother sent him to the store "to get a pizza"— "three slices, one for my mom, one for my dad, and one for me"—he says he saw a homeless man who told him he was hungry...
...That is one area of 'family breakdown' that the sociologists and the newspapers do not often speak of...
...I gave him some...
...Shirley Flowers, whose neighbors call her "Miss Shirley," sits for several hours every day at a table in the lobby of her building to keep out drug dealers...
...The family lived upstairs...
...Why do you want to put so many people with small children in a place with so much sickness...
...Mr...
...Listening to her voice, which does sound like that of someone who is feeling beaten, I find myself thinking of the words of certain politicians who believe that we have got to get much tougher with unmarried, indigent, non-working women...
...God told us, 'Share!'" When I ask him who his heroes are he first says "Michael Jackson," and then, "Oprah...
...We walk as far as Alexander Avenue, then circle back...
...It's a complicated story, but it seems that her food stamps and her welfare payment had been stolen from her in the street some months before...
...His uncle, however, who lives with his grandmother, is, he says, "not happy...
...The day is coming when the world will be destroyed," he finally announces...
...Had two of her babies there...
...I'd rather have a peaceful little life just with my kids than live with somebody who knows that he's a failure...
...I think I'll have another one," he says, and takes one for himself...
...A kingdom is a place of glory...
...Yes, he goes out...
...One is a child, twelve years old, shot in a crossfire at the bus stop on the corner...
...They're burning bodies down there," he announces ominously...
...When she began the process of replacing them, there was a computer error that removed her from the rolls entirely...
...This family talks to God...
...I ask, "Does it insult you...
...I try to get him to speak about "important" persons as the schools tend to define them: "Have you read about George Washington...
...Desperate would be a plague...
...What kind of bodies...
...Then you see it and you read it...
...She responds by giving him a half-sarcastic look, hesitating, and then saying, "Hey...
...You want to go the hard way or the easy way back to the church...
...Ann's Church in Mott Haven on a hot summer afternoon, one is immediately in the presence of small children...
...She looks at him hard, grabs him suddenly around the neck, and kisses him...
...Many cry...
...Brook Avenue, the tenth stop on the local, lies in the center of Mott Haven, whose 48,000 people are the poorest in the South Bronx...
...Walking into St...
...They get into their hair and skin...
...Mary's Park, right at the end of Beekman Avenue, where "they hacked at him with machetes" and a serrated knife, "opening wounds so severe that some of his organs spilled out...
...Washington one evening when we're sitting in her kitchen, has another sixteen patients in the building...
...Some of them were killed with guns...
...Yes...
...The point is they put a lot of things into our neighborhood that no one wants," she says...
...Then he corrects himself...
...If it's dinnertime, I'll bring them in and feed them...
...I pray...
...I know that there was cancer...
...If poor people behaved rationally," says Lawrence Mead, a professor of political science at New York University, "they would seldom be poor for long in the first place...
...Now there was also a plague of Egypt where the firstborn died...
...he asks...
...Let's go the easy way," I say...
...How did you decide on that...
...She's lost her hair...
...This is a place of pain...
...In one mid-day mutilation, Newsday reported, gang enforcers punished a refractory gang member by taking him to St...
...They marketed crack in a distinctive vial with a red and orange cap, and disciplined dishonest dealers by such terrifying means as mutilations...
...Some are older people...
...I've been here in this building twenty-four years and I've seen it all...
...Drivers get their drugs there and their prostitutes...
...He speaks, moreover, in a frequently inverted syntax, which I take at first to be the consequences of his bilingualism, but soon discover also has some other, more literary explanations...
...I saw a boy shot in the head right over there," he says a moment later...
...Why would they be mad...
...Other times," she says, "a neighbor takes the baby...
...She grew up in Harlem and the Bronx and went to segregated public schools, not something of her choosing, nor that of her mother and her father...
...At other times, when he's upset, he says, "I sleep with a picture of my mother and I dream of her...
...I ask...
...Mary's Park and shot there fourteen times...
...What happens to the kids," I ask, "when mothers are in prison...
...You sure that you don't want a cookie...
...If we saw the children in these neighborhoods as part of the same human family to which we belong, we'd never put them in such places to begin with...
...His grandmother, he tells me, is "the happiest person that I know...
...It was at this time that she learned she carried the AIDS virus...
...For many, many days has it been on the Earth...
...I feel like somebody beat me up...
...ow much tougher could we get with Mrs...
...I cannot be God...
...I ask about The Masque of the Red Death, which I have never read...
...Come on," he says, "I'll take you there...
...Nothing, however, has prepared me for the fascination and intelligence this thirteen-year-old displays as he describes the things that interest him and those that sadden him...
...I think that feeding people makes her happy...
...I say to them, 'Stay here with me...
...I've seen a generation die," she answers...
...Because he had not a very happy life...
...Do you cry for your uncle...
...She tells me that 3,000 homeless families have been relocated by the city in this neighborhood during the past few years and asks a question I hear from many other people here...
...Yes, I cry...
...Ann's and takes me for a walk to see the building where he lives, a few blocks to the west and north, and the building where his grandmother lives, which is close to the same neighborhood and which he says he likes to visit because "my grandma feeds me...
...Next to another vacant lot where someone has dumped a heap of auto tires and some rusted auto parts, he points to a hypodermic needle in the tangled grass and to the bright-colored caps of crack containers, then, for no reason that I can discern, starts puffing up his cheeks and blowing out the air, a curious behavior that seems whimsical and absent-minded and disconsolate at the same time...
...I don't know why," he says...
...I see her mother all the time...
...he answers, "Mr...
...Can't go to school...
...Cheerful...
...Bears," he says...
...When I first met Anthony, the Reverend Overall had told me that he was "unusual...
...Visibly fragile as a consequence of having AIDS and highly susceptible to chest infections, she lives with her son, who is a high-school senior, in a first-floor apartment with three steel locks on the door...
...When I visit, we talk for a while of some of the children I have met at St...
...It's not a sin to cry...
...When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest Congressional district in the nation...
...Everything breaks down in a place like this...
...To get an emergency replacement for my check," she says, "I needed to bring three letters to the welfare office—one from my doctor, one from the hospital, and one from my social worker____ "I got the doctor's letter and the social worker's letter, but the hospital's letter didn't come...
...Seal them!' he said...
...We're living in a bad time...
...I think that's probably true...
...Again I say, "No, thank you...
...From one of its metal sliding doors, a sourly unpleasant odor drifts into the street...
...Sometimes, the Reverend Overall has told me, the city needs to use sandblasters to remove these tributes to the dead...
...Little, sharp pins, like tuberculosis," he replies...
...The immune agents of the heart break down...
...We follow Jackson Avenue past several boarded buildings and a "flat-fix" shop, stop briefly in front of a fenced-in lot where the police of New York City bring impounded cars, and then turn left and go two blocks to a highway with an elevated road above it, where a sign says Bruckner Boulevard...
...Cliffie's mother is a small, wiry woman wearing blue jeans and a baseball cap, a former cocaine addict who now helps addicted women and their kids...
...That's easy," he replies...
...Because I have read his books," he says...
...Mother Martha does not have a heart of stone...
...The truth is, you get used to the offense...
...Some are children born with AIDS...
...Now a brother of hers is out there, too...
...Alice Washington lives on a street called Boston Road, close to East Tremont Avenue, about two miles north of St...
...The nurse, says Mrs...
...Anyway, they got me rannin' uptown, downtown, to the hospital, to 34th Street, to the welfare, with the streets so hot and everyone at welfare so impatient...
...So he closes all the windows, all the gates, and all the doors, even the little peepholes in the doors...
...Inside the church, when I return Cliffie to her, she looks at me with some amusement on her face and asks, "Did this child wear you out...
...Is he well enough to go outside...
...Washington, I have spent hundreds of hours talking with her in her kitchen...
...Or else like AIDS, because of the disease that gets into the blood, but maybe more like cancer...
...Would you like a chocolate-chip cookie...
...Poverty's Children Growing up in the South Bronx BY JONATHAN KOZOL The Number Six train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the eighteen-minute ride between East 59th Street and Brook Avenue...
...From her husband, after many years of what she thought to be monogamous matrimony, she contracted the AIDS virus...
...This," he says with a gesture out the window that seems to take in many things beyond the dealers on the sidewalk and the tawdry-looking storefront medical office and the "Farmacia" sign across the street, "this out here is not God's kingdom...
...The medical waste incinerator is a new-looking building, gun-metal blue on top of cinder blocks...
...Some lost their minds from drugs...
...It occurs to me that I must be one in a long line of people who have come to ask her questions...
...After spending close to four years in three shelters in Manhattan, she was moved by the city to the neighborhood where she now lives in the South Bronx...
...You've been cut off.' "My doctor says, when it comes to the poor, they can't get nothin' right...
...Mr...
...It's like they put you in a bucket, like a wishing well...
...Why exactly 100 years...
...Flowers's home on Beekman Avenue...
...The man looks at the ground...
...We walk down the street to Children's Park, and then, because there are too many addicts there and it is growing very cold, we walk another block and find a sandwich shop where we can sit inside and talk...
...Whenever you see a child who enjoys life in this neighborhood, come and see gale me right away...
...He thinks this over, as if to check that he is being accurate, then reports, "Not any...
...P/o/os is the word the Puerto Rican children use...
...Drugs are a plague also but the one who gets it does not have to be the firstborn...
...In this building...
...The pipes break down...
...No," I say...
...I think there are certain children who are happy anywhere," I tell him...
...What else can I say...
...He couldn't talk...
...Washington done wrong...
...What did you do...
...It can be the second son...
...Flowers, "Have you ever seen a shooting victim die before your eyes...
...How much tougher could we get with Mrs...
...Would you be happy if you had to live here...
Vol. 59 • October 1995 • No. 10
