Fire in the Ashes (22 page)

August 30: “I think she’s made good progress. She’s been cooperative and has frequently surprised herself when she’s come upon a complicated word she says she’s never seen before but has decoded it successfully. All in all, I’m feeling very positive.”

Her progress remained gradual that year and the next. “It’s still tough,” she told me in the winter of her third year at the school, “but my teachers say I’m doing better.” And, although she had to struggle even harder in the year that followed—at times, the gains that she was making would come
nearly to a standstill as the subject matter in her eighth-grade classes became increasingly complex—she continued moving, almost imperceptibly, closer to grade level.

She had only one complaint about the students at the school. Some of the wealthier girls, she said “stick together all the time. You know, like they’re better than the rest of us?” But, she added, there were others “who try to be nice to me.” In the spring of that year, one of her classmates asked her to a weekend birthday party at her family’s country house. Pineapple was astounded when she and two other girls were picked up in Manhattan in a helicopter.

“Wow!” she said. “I’ve never seen a house as big as that before.” But she said that she enjoyed the party, and all the girls were given presents by her schoolmate’s parents.

The school, regrettably, had no upper level. It ended in eighth grade. At that point, the pastor once again began exploring private schools with which she was familiar in order that Pineapple would not lose the gains she’d made and would get the further preparation she would need if she were to realize what was now her stated goal of going on to college—the same goal that her classmates for the past four years regarded as a normal expectation.

Here, once again, Martha’s well-developed gift for reaching out to institutions that professed to have a deep commitment to inclusiveness turned out to be essential. An excellent school, not in New York but, as it happened, in Rhode Island, where a group of charitable people had come to know Pineapple in the course of volunteer work they’d been doing at St. Ann’s, accepted her enthusiastically and provided nearly a full scholarship to pay for her tuition. An Episcopal church, affiliated with the school, raised extra funds to cover costs that weren’t included in the scholarship.

Pineapple knew she’d miss her parents and her sisters—and her little brother, who was three years old by now—but she became excited about going to the school after she
had visited and met some of its teachers and seen its lovely campus, which was in a town not far from Providence. Although the school was rigorous in academic terms, it was less internally competitive than what she had been used to in New York. The demographics of the school were also more diverse—“majority white,” Pineapple told me, “many Asian, many black, some Hispanic, and some who are ‘combinations.’ ”

She entered the school in 2004 and felt at home there from the start. The white girls in her class, some of whom were wealthy but not at the stratospheric level of so many of her classmates in New York, did not, she told me, “go around in cliques together. It’s a different kind of school. Everybody here is nice to one another. It’s like—you know?—we all accept each other.”

She did confess she missed her family, as she had expected. “I’ve never been away from home before,” she told me in the winter. “So I’ve had to learn how to adapt to that.” But she said with pride that, even though her grades were “you know? not so good?” she didn’t flunk any of her courses in the first semester; and she did much better in the one that followed.

One of the special virtues of this school was its quick responsiveness to difficulties students might encounter at the start of a new course or at the introduction of new subject matter in a given course. When she ran into problems, teachers did not wait until she had received a crushing set of grades but intervened before she had to undergo that blow to her self-confidence. “They’d say, ‘I’ll help you. You come in.’ And I’d go in. And right away, they’d sit you down and show you something you were doing wrong. And it was like they knew how to ‘unblock’ you. And they’d kind of hold your hand until they knew you got the point. And then I’d move right on.…”

By her second year, her reading comprehension had “skyrocketed”—that was her English teacher’s term—but, with the volume of material her classes were assigned to read, keeping up with those assignments, said the teacher, wasn’t easy for her. By this time, however, she’d developed strong attachments to her teachers. She listed several that she said she “liked really a lot.” All but one were women. One of them, she said, “is very young and she lives on campus and she helps me to correct my papers, but she doesn’t keep reminding me when I have something due. She makes me remind
myself
. If I don’t, she says she isn’t going to pass me.

“When I talk with her at night? It’s not about my work. It’s completely different. She’s not strict with me at all. She’s like a big sister.”

In academic terms, that second year became the breakthrough year. Still struggling to perfect her writing skills and needing to read more each night than she’d ever had to read before, still missing deadlines on her class assignments more often than she should, she nonetheless appeared to have emerged from any last remaining doubts as to whether she would meet the school’s prerequisites for graduation. “It was that year,” she told me, looking back upon this later, “that I knew for sure that I could do it and that I’d be going on to college.”

Throughout this time, her older sister, Lara, was in the New York City schools, where she’d been enticed into the same middle school, the same pretended “school for medical careers,” that Lisette, Vicky’s daughter, had attended also.

I was relieved when a teacher at the school who was impressed by Lara’s eagerness to learn made contact with
me on his own and told me he believed that he could find the time to give her extra help in order to make up for the historic failings of a school he was too honest to romanticize.
Lara had escaped the run of short-term teachers and ensuing chaos that Pineapple’s class had undergone at P.S. 65. Her basic skills were well intact; so, with the tutorial assistance provided by her teacher, she managed to get out of middle school with creditable grades.

In high school she again attracted the attention of an empathetic teacher who singled her out as a potential candidate for college. She later told me how important this had been, because the school, as she put it bluntly, was “not a very good one.” It was one of the newest generation of heavily promoted but unsuccessful “niche academies,” targeted at kids of color, that allegedly had found a way, in the unconvincing jargon that continues to be used today, “to break the mold” of failing schools and, again in the vocabulary more or less expected of administrators in the urban schools, “turn it all around.”

If anyone had actually turned this school around, it had not been in a good direction. “We started,” Lara told me, “with sixty students in my ninth-grade class. Only twenty of them graduated,” she recalled—“and only ten of them deserved to.”

Lara had been looking at college options in New York but, by the spring, she told me she’d decided to attend a college in Rhode Island so that she’d be near her younger sister. Pineapple had been on her own for two years by this time. Now, at last, the two would be together.

Lara was awarded a financial package by the college, and the people at the church who had helped to meet Pineapple’s costs provided help to her as well. Still, she had to take on a substantial workload to earn enough to meet her personal expenses. Both Lara and Pineapple had to work during the summers too. Neither girl expected to be given
a free ride. They also liked the sense of independence it afforded them to be earning money on their own.

At the end of Lara’s freshman year in college and Pineapple’s junior year at boarding school, I got a startling and excited phone call from Pineapple.

“Guess what?” she said. “My mother and father are moving to Rhode Island!” Her parents, she explained, after having been there several times to visit her, and now with Lara living there as well, had come to the decision to follow them out of New York and look for a home they could afford close to the town in which Pineapple went to school. “Jonathan! They’re really going to do it!” said Pineapple.

Things moved quickly after that. In a letter Lara sent me only a month later, she told me they had found a house and that the people from the church had “helped my mother find a job.” Her father, she said, had found one on his own.

Isabella’s job was in a local nursing home, caring for the elderly. Virgilio talked his way into a culinary job at one of the best hotels in Providence. His experience in cooking at a restaurant in Guatemala was not discounted this time, as had been the case when he was working in New York. The position he was given, as best I understood, was something on the order of a sous-chef in the hotel’s dining room.

The modest home Pineapple’s parents found was in a waterside community where their backyard faced directly on a walkway, bordered by a biking path, and was just adjacent to a wooden footbridge that crossed a channel leading to the ocean. Mosquito was admitted to the school Pineapple was attending. When he was old enough, their little brother, Miguel, was admitted there as well.

Happily, the distance between Rhode Island and New York was short enough for members of their family to come up and visit them on a routine basis. They’d usually come in Eliseo’s van, since he was the only family member who could afford a car. He shared it sometimes with Pineapple’s
father, who had obtained a driver’s license shortly after coming to New York. As a result, the bond between the children and their New York relatives continued to be strong.

Pineapple moved in with her family for her senior year. Academically, things never became easy for her, even at a school that did so much to bring her up to pace with other students in her class. But there was no question in her teachers’ minds that she would complete her studies in good order. And, while her grade-point average in the spring semester of that final year was not as high as she would have liked, she did get honors grades in two of her five subjects and passed the others with two C’s and one B-minus.

Her graduation was a joyful day. A good-sized delegation from the family in New York drove up to the school to watch her walk across the stage and be handed her diploma. Afterwards, her parents had a party in their yard, as they did every time one of their children had achieved a victory they’d hoped for. According to her father, she was just the second person in their family (Lara was the first) to graduate from high school.

Three months later, she would be in college.

Pineapple had gone on college tours with members of her class. But she had done this dutifully, in order not to be dismissive of all possibilities, because she had already settled on the college Lara had selected two years earlier. She had friends there among Lara’s classmates. More important, she would have her sister there when she felt the need for someone to confide in.

Each of them, however, had made divergent choices when it came to fields of concentration. Lara had begun her
first year as an education major, then switched to “English Lit and Writing” and, she said, “I’m glad I did because I’m reading so much stuff I really love that I never would have had the time to read if I’d stayed on in the program for certification.” Pineapple, on the other hand, decided upon social work and she never wavered from this plan throughout the years of college.

Her first semesters were more challenging for her than I think she had expected. She failed two courses, one of them a science class, because she said she didn’t realize, when she chose it, that it was “way, way too advanced for me” and there was a basic course she should have taken first. “Bio-science.… I didn’t transfer out in time.”

Still, she was by no means drowning or demoralized. Her letters and phone calls were mostly optimistic, sparked with funny anecdotes and interesting insights into the dynamics of relationships among the different ethnic groups within the student body. In the spring, for instance, when she took a course in urban studies, she told me something that she said surprised her—“and, to tell the truth, it kind of annoys me”—about the way the other students, who were mostly white, tended to defer to her when it came to questions about race.

“Every time something comes up in the class about the inner cities? You know? About the kids who live there? And the problems of their parents? And the schools they go to? And, you know, the bad stuff people think that everyone gets into? It seems like all the white kids in the class turn around and look at me before they give an answer. It’s like they want to check things out with me, to ask for my permission. I tell them, ‘Go ahead, girl! Speak your mind! If I think you’ve got it wrong, I’ll
tell
you.’ ”

I was glad that her straightforward and ebullient style hadn’t been diminished too much by the struggles she’d been through while she’d been at prep school. I had the
impression that her confidence to say what she believed had been eclipsed to a degree during those secondary years. Now, it seemed, her likable impertinence, although with more discretion and maturity, was flourishing once more.

Still, I knew she had her insecurities. In a letter I received in the year that followed from a woman who emerged as one of the most consistently supportive friends and allies to Pineapple and her sisters, she wrote these words: “Brave fronts, soft souls.” She was referring to the fortitude the girls displayed when, in Pineapple’s second year of college, her parents were confronted with a difficult dilemma that would force the girls to summon up a greater sense of self-reliance than had been required of them in the past. (I will return to that dilemma shortly.)

But the “soft soul,” in Pineapple’s case at least—an ever-present recognition of her vulnerable status as a student, a quiet understanding of her family’s ultimate dependence on the loyalty, and
continuity
of loyalty, of those in Rhode Island who had been there from the start in the role of their defenders—this, along with an inherent tenderness of character, easily wounded sensibilities, emotions that were far more fragile than she would allow the world to see, were always there, as she would confide to me a little later on, just beneath the surface of audacity.