Fire in the Ashes (18 page)

“You sure,” he asked, “that you don’t want a cookie?”

I thanked him but declined.

“I think I’ll have another one,” he said.

A few moments later, he announced, “The day is coming when the world will be destroyed. Everyone is going to be burned to crispy cookies.”

A car stopped to let us cross a busy street. He waved at the driver, who waved back.

“We’re out of cookies,” he reported. “I ate a whole bag.…”

When we got back to the church, Leonardo’s mother and the pastor told me that his story about “burning bodies” had not been a fib at all—or was only a slight exaggeration. The building that he’d shown me was, in fact, burning
parts
of bodies, among other objects, and the odor I had smelled when Leonardo and I stood outside was usually more powerful.

As Martha would explain to me, the building was a medical incinerator, burning what are known as “red-bag products,” hospital waste, amputated limbs and embryos, hypodermic needles, and the like, which were brought here every day from fourteen New York hospitals. An attempt to build a comparable incinerator on the East Side of Manhattan had been halted when physicians and environmentalists cautioned people living in that area of carcinogenic and respiratory dangers it might pose for children. As a result, it was constructed here instead, within a few blocks of a neighborhood in which
at least 6,000 children such as Leonardo were residing and could not escape its emanations. The burner, moreover, because of its high smokestacks, spewed its toxins to a wider population of approximately 40,000 people, virtually all them black or Hispanic families.

“When it’s going full blast,” Leonardo’s mother told me, “the stench is really potent. I have to close my windows, but it gets to Leonardo anyway.”

Parents in the neighborhood launched impassioned protests over a period of years, beginning at the time of its
construction in 1991. But their pleadings were discredited by the influential New York Times, which supported the construction of the burner in their neighborhood and said that the resistance of the parents was “misguided.”

Under the headline “
WASTEFUL PROTEST IN THE BRONX
,” the paper ran an editorial that may have been decisive in the outcome of the question. “It would be a tragic mistake,” according to the Times, if “panicky fears” of those who led the protests were to halt this installation.

“
Medical wastes are not only unsightly but dangerous. No one wants them in a residential neighborhood.” The “only place for such a facility,” the editorial continued, was in “a zone” where construction of residential housing was “forbidden”—a puzzling assertion in view of the fact that Leonardo and I were only about five minutes from his home when we stood in front of the waste burner, but which the paper justified on the technicality that the burner had been built just across the border of an adjoining area, which, according to the zoning laws, had been adjudged to be “industrial.”

Leonardo’s mother—her name was Anne, but people who enjoyed her feisty personality used to call her “Antsy”—was one of the parents in Mott Haven who had fought most fiercely in opposition to the medical incinerator and who was convinced that it would be harmful to the children in the neighborhood. Four years later, in 1995, hospitalizations for attacks of asthma in Mott Haven and in neighborhoods nearby were fourteen times as high as on the East Side of Manhattan. By that time, the pediatric asthma rate in the community affected was, according to a pediatric specialist with whom I consulted, higher than in any other urban area of the United States.

Even before the waste incinerator went into operation, asthma rates in Mott Haven and adjoining areas had been very high. One reason was believed to be the concentration
of several other factors known to be injurious to a child’s respiration—truck depots, for example, in which eighteen-wheelers would be parked with engines idling, venting their exhaust into the air. Large bus depots added to the problem, as did the lack of proper sanitation and healthy ventilation in much of the housing in the neighborhood. Physicians who were treating
asthmatic children in Mott Haven were troubled that the city now had added yet another source of toxins to the air these children had to breathe.

The incinerator was at last shut down by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in 1997. A year later, under a consent decree, the
Browning-Ferris Corporation, owner of the installation where 500 violations of environmental law and air-pollution law had been recorded, agreed to donate money so that children who had trouble breathing could attend an “asthma camp.”

All of this, from Antsy’s point of view, was a classic instance of racism gone wild. But, for Leonardo, pulling out his asthma pump to take a puff or two or three when he began to wheeze, it had come to be a fairly normal part of his existence and, to all appearances, he did not let it slow him down or undermine the pleasure that he took in making observations that he may not always have intended to be quite as funny or alarming as they were.

It was only at night, his mother said, that his wheezing grew severe enough for her to be concerned. During the day, his asthma pump and whatever other medication he was taking seemed to keep his asthma under fairly good control. And, with his whimsical and comic personality and his ease at making friends and his popularity among the children at St. Ann’s and at his public school, he struck me as a relatively happy little boy and one with whom I always found it fun to talk because, among his other virtues, he was never boring.

He did get quite a lot of satisfaction out of making off-the-wall remarks, some of which I was convinced he must have known a grown-up would find startling. He told me once, when I met him on the street a block or two from where he lived, that somebody—“this man I saw”—had “buried another man back there,” gesturing behind him. “The man he buried was alive.”

I asked him, “Did you try to dig him out?”

“No!” he said. “It was too gross!” He told me he had asked the man, “ ‘Are you still alive?’ But he said no.”

He left the story there and, as he often did after saying something that he purposely left incomplete, he began to hum. Then he continued walking in the way that he was heading.

In the years that followed, I spent a lot of afternoons and evenings visiting at Leonardo’s home, which was on the fifth floor of one of those buildings, the Diego-Beekman Houses, that Ariella had described. His mother, Antsy, was one of the savvier and more politically acerbic parents in the neighborhood. A very smart and largely self-taught intellectual, it seemed that she had done a great deal of reading in her teenage years and throughout her twenties and had thoroughly immersed herself in some of the writings of prominent black authors who had captured the attention of the public in the last years of the 1960s. One evening in her home, she carefully explained to me the highly conscious strategies by which black and Hispanic people in the Bronx were isolated racially by New York’s city planners in the years when white folks who had previously lived there “started their stampede to get as far away from us as possible,” and she quoted from an essay of James Baldwin that I had long forgotten.

Like Ariella, she had an investigative instinct and she knew a bit about the owner of her building—“lives in Massachusetts, your neck of the woods,” she said—and she had a barrel of well-justified complaints about the disrepair her landlord had allowed and told me of her battle “to keep the rats behind the walls” from “getting out into my kitchen area.”

Her background, however, was very different from that of Ariella. She had grown up in the South and came to New York City with her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother was a nurse at Albert Einstein Medical School for twenty-seven years and lived, she said, in one of the nicer sections of the Bronx that hadn’t yet been totally abandoned by white people, although the trend was underway and the schools, as a result, had already started their decline. Her father, from whom her mother was divorced, had moved upstate to Syracuse and, having had some training in “concrete construction,” opened his own business and brought Antsy there to live with him so that she could go to a good high school in his neighborhood.

She apparently did well in school, studied hard and graduated but, as she put it, “had no special interest in going on to college.” When I asked her why she didn’t want to go to college, she said that she’d been caught up in “the whole thing of the hippie era—‘Do your own thing,’ you know, Beatles music, Ram Dass, ‘wear a flower in your hair.’ ” Unfortunately, it led her, as it did so many others, into being careless about using drugs—“first,” she said, “just smoking weed, doing acid … whatever else was on the scene. But then I started using coke,” which she called “a very bad mistake.…”

At some point in her later twenties, she told me that she fell in love. “A good-looking man, who just happened to be deep into drug-dealing,” although she claims she didn’t
know that at the time. Before she got to know him, she said she used to see him from the window of a bus. “He’d wave to me, and I’d wave back. He had salt-and-pepper hair. I thought I was very cool. But when it came to making judgments about men, I was as green as a turnip that fell off the truck. To me, he was the sweetest guy in the entire world.”

Within another year or so, the two of them were living together and, in time, were married. Leonardo was born while they were still in Syracuse, but Antsy wanted to be near her mother, so they moved back to New York.

Her husband, she said, was not faithful to her and made little effort to disguise his infidelity. “He’d bring other women here when I wasn’t home. One of my neighbors told me, ‘Honey, I don’t want to shoot your gears but I’ve been sleeping with him in your bedroom for a year.’ I’d kick him out two or three times every month. But you know ‘a fool in love’? After I had thrown him out, I’d miss him and I’d go out looking for him in the neighborhood.…”

The problem was taken out of her hands when he was arrested and sent away to jail. The timing was fortuitous, since Leonardo now was three years old and Antsy was determined to devote every bit of energy she had to making sure her very talkative and charming little boy had every opportunity to enjoy a happy childhood, and she also was determined to begin his education well before the time when he would enter public school.

“I taught him how to read when he was three or four. I put him into Aida Rosa’s preschool”—a reference to my favorite principal in the South Bronx, who set up a preschool on the street where Antsy lived so the children who came into P.S. 30, the good elementary school she ran, would be well prepared.

Like Ariella with her younger children, Antsy had avoided sending him to P.S. 65 but put him into kindergarten at Miss Rosa’s school. (People in the neighborhood
did not say ‘Ms.,’ but always ‘Miss,’ before the names of women of a certain age, followed often by the woman’s first name, but they’d use the last name in the case of principals and teachers.) “Then, for no good reason I can figure out, I put him into Catholic school, but the third-grade teacher whipped the kids and so I brought him back to P.S. 30, where he had some of the teachers that you know, like Miss Harrinarine”—a fifth-grade teacher who taught a number of the children who were most successful in their later years.

“He never stops talking,” this very strict but good-natured teacher told me once. “But he’s so excited and the comments he comes up with are usually so funny that I have to turn my back so he won’t see me laughing.”

By the time he had completed elementary school, a cluster of Miss Rosa’s teachers, one of whom was Miss Harrinarine, had begun a small and innovative satellite of P.S. 30, also run along progressive lines, which extended into middle school. So Leonardo was enabled to escape the so-called “medical” school and the other middle school to which the kids from the local elementary schools were sent.

Antsy was a hustler in the best sense of the term. She grabbed opportunities whenever they were there. She questioned teachers. She went into the classrooms. When Leonardo followed Miss Harrinarine into the experimental school that I’ve described, the principal told me, “She’s always in my hair. She wants to know why we’re doing this, or why we’re doing that.” In the long run, though, Miss Harrinarine said, “I admire her a lot. She asks good questions. Her mind is constantly in motion. I enjoy it when she comes into my room.” She said that Leonardo’s mother was “the kind of parent every teacher hopes for. I wish that we had more of them.…”

A few years earlier, when Leonardo was in second or third grade, Antsy had begun a baseball team for a group of kids about his age. They played and practiced at St. Mary’s Park, which bordered the Diego-Beekman Houses and was “not a place you’d want to go alone at night,” she pointed out, “but was safe during the day.” As she was talking, she went to the closet and took out a baseball jacket with her name embroidered under the word
MANAGER
.

Every year, she told me, she organized a party for the children on her team on a street that was adjacent to St. Mary’s Park. The street, she said, was part of the province of the Wild Cowboys, the gang of dealers that controlled that side of St. Ann’s Avenue. “They’d stand there on the sidewalk selling their own brands of crack, ‘Yellow Top,’ ‘Red Top,’ ‘Blue Top,’ ‘Green Top’…. ‘Tango and Cash’ was their brand of heroin. They’d whisper it to people as you were walking past.…

“There’s a dead-end street partway up off Beekman Ave. There were two small houses next to each other on one side of the block. One was occupied. One was abandoned. That’s the one the Cowboys used to hold their meetings and to package up their drugs—you know, little vials with the colored tops for crack and small glassine bags for heroin. Next door to their building was a junked-up lot.

“Jonathan, don’t think that I’m crazy, but that’s the place I decided we should have our parties. No cars. No traffic. And, besides, I made up my mind that we shouldn’t let a gang of hoodlums claim it as their own.