Fire in the Ashes (37 page)

I told him that the building looked good from the outside.

“Outside, yes. Go inside—it’s not.”

The Diego-Beekman complex, on the other hand, has undergone a sweeping transformation in the past eleven years. In 1999, after years of protests on the part of tenants and a number of investigations and reports by
government officials, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development made a series of demands to Mr. Schuster and his co-investors in Continental Wingate. The company decided it would be in its financial interest to reject the government’s demands and, instead, give up the buildings altogether.

By this time, HUD already had begun investing public funds to make improvements in the buildings because, according to an agency official, “conditions … were horrendous.” And, after negotiations with the tenant leaders and those who were advising them, the government agreed to transfer ownership of the entire complex to the board of a nonprofit corporation that included tenant representatives but also, at the government’s insistence, several other people, one of whom was Martha, who had had experience in financial management.

Martha is circumspect in speaking of the progress that has since been made. Drug dealers, she says, still attempt to force the locks or get into the buildings by breaking down the doors. But repairs are made more quickly. Security is better. And, in the buildings I’ve revisited last winter and this fall, the stairways and lobbies are much cleaner than before. Garbage and human waste no longer pile up on the basement floors, which are no longer breeding grounds
for rats and vermin. Parents and their children, and the many older women living in these buildings, are no longer subject to the loss of self-respect they had to undergo when their rental payments and their housing subsidies went to a landlord in another city who seemed to be unburdened by a sense of basic decency. Instead, that money pays for a degree of dignity in their daily lives. By any standard, this is no small victory.

The news about the schools is less auspicious. In spite of the efforts of many very good and innovative teachers who have a deep commitment to the children of the area, it would overstate the case to argue that the schools in which they work have been dramatically improved.

At P.S. 65, a number of principals have come and gone since I started visiting. Each of them did what they could to bring improvements to the school, but these incremental victories soon would wash away. Part of the building has been taken over by a charter school, which often makes things harder for the faculty and children of a public school by creating rivalries for space. There is one good piece of news, however, for the children at this school. The newest principal, appointed very recently, is
the former fifth-grade teacher, Miss Harrinarine, who taught at
P.S. 30 when Miss Rosa was the principal and whose class I liked to visit as often as I could—the teacher Leonardo used to entertain and whom Tabitha adored. If she cannot work a miracle at P.S. 65, I doubt that anybody can.

Aida Rosa retired from P.S. 30 in 2002. After her departure, the school went through four different principals in a single year. A fifth principal, who began in 2003, has now moved on. A new principal was appointed earlier this year. The school is rated very high for its academic progress over recent years, but parents say that P.S. 30 no longer has the intimate and protective feeling that Miss Rosa—“Mama Rosa,” as some of the little ones and their
mothers used to call her—was able to engender. Here, too, a charter school now occupies a portion of the building.

There are several other elementary schools serving the same neighborhood or neighborhoods nearby. Some are doing fairly well. Others, unhappily, are not. At one of these schools, not far from St. Ann’s, 60 percent of students failed to meet the minimal literacy standards of the state last year. At another, 77 percent were in the failing category. All in all, there has been some very modest progress at the elementary level in Mott Haven, but it is uneven.

Meanwhile, there are the charter schools, like those now sharing space with P.S. 65 and P.S. 30. Some of them, allegedly, are coming up with better scores than the larger public schools within the same community. But questions are inevitably raised as to whether they are offering higher levels of instruction or, as in the instance of the small academy that Jeremy attended for two unhappy years, simply drilling students more remorselessly on the narrow slice of subjects that are measured by the standardized exams. All of these schools, in any case, in the Bronx as elsewhere in the nation, serve only a small fraction of the student population, and students who do not conform to what the charter schools demand are frequently encouraged to go back into the public schools they came from.

The middle schools of the South Bronx continue, with a few exceptions, to be disaster zones. At one of the middle schools somewhat to the north and west of St. Ann’s Church, only 11 percent of students have passing scores in English, and 14 percent in math. Another middle school, only eight blocks from the church—one that was highly rated, with good reason, in the 1990s when I looked at classes there—has subsequently lost the glories of its past. Only 21 percent of students now have passing scores in English, and 28 percent in math.

Some comfort may be derived from the news that the
violent middle school Jeremy attended was shut down in 1999. Two smaller middle schools now occupy the building. But the new schools apparently have problems of their own. At one of them, only 14 percent of students are reading at grade level—at the other, 12 percent. None of these schools, large or small, is offering the kind of education that the children of the neighborhood deserve.

High schools in the Bronx continue to suffer from catastrophic noncompletion and nongraduation rates. The numbers for black male students are particularly bad. Citywide,
72 percent of black males entering the ninth grade have dropped out of school before the end of senior year or, if they remain in school, do not gain the academic competence to graduate, according to a 2010 report from the respected Schott Foundation for Public Education. That, it’s worth repeating, is the figure for New York as a whole. The failure rate for black males who go to high schools in the Bronx may be even worse.

So long as very poor black and Hispanic children continue to be locked into nearly absolute racial isolation in underserved and underfunded schools, the innovative efforts of successive mayors and their appointed chancellors to create “successful” separate and unequal education in New York will likely be in vain. That, at least, is the lesson history has taught us ever since the benighted ruling in
Plessy v. Ferguson
was accepted as a proper guideline for the education of our children—which, in spite of its reversal in
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954, is still effectively accepted and almost never questioned by those who run the New York City schools.

I had a momentary glimpse of unrealistic hope when I heard about the artists and photographers and others who were moving into buildings on the southern fringes of Mott Haven. I wondered whether they would send their children, if they did have children, to the public schools attended by
black and Hispanic students in the area. Figures from the New York City Board of Education indicate no such optimistic possibilities for now. Last year, at P.S. 30, zero percent of students were Caucasian. The same was true at P.S. 65.

“You’ve been back to P.S. 65,” Ariella says, “You’ve seen the children coming out the door. Do you see white children?”

More than half a year has passed since I saw Pineapple last when she came back to visit us in Cambridge in the spring, but she’s kept in touch with me. In recent months she’s had a hard time with her health. Her phone calls and the texts and e-mails that she sends strike me as remarkable because they’ve been so cheerful and so optimistic, even while some of the news that she’s been giving me has not been good at all.

At the start of August, she told me she’d been tested by her doctor, because she’d been feeling weak and had some other symptoms that concerned him, “and he found out from the tests that I’m pre-diabetic.” But, she said, in a voice that didn’t sound alarmed at all, “he told me what I need to do, and I’m workin’ on it so I can be healthier.”

Two weeks later, after she had further tests, the preliminary diagnosis was revised. “I have diabetes. I have to begin with my new medicine tonight.”

The new medicine was not insulin, she said, but an oral medication—“I have to take two different pills, each of them once a day.” She’d been shown how to use what she called “the strips and prickers.… I have to do it twice a day to take a sample of my blood, but I can use the prickers twice. So I only have to use one pricker every day.”

I would have thought most people would be knocked flat or, at least, disoriented for a time by the information she had just received. But she sounded organized and calm and seemed to have the regimen ahead of her under good control.

I asked about her health insurance, which I more or less assumed would be provided by her college. But she told me, not without embarrassment, that she’d opted out of it a year before, “because it’s so expensive” and she didn’t think she’d ever need it at her age. The people at the college said she could apply to Medicaid for now.

A week later: The social security office, she reported, had informed her that she didn’t qualify for government assistance. “Guess why?” she said. “Because I’m a college student! And, besides, they told me somebody with diabetes of the kind I have isn’t actually ‘disabled.’ ” So, she said, “in other words, they turned me down.”

Pineapple was too dignified to ask for my financial help in getting through this crisis. But I told her right away I could take care of the monthly costs she faced until the next semester, when she’d be permitted to get on the college plan again. She sent me about seven e-mails to express her gratitude. I assured her that the money didn’t come from me but from readers of the books I’d written about people like herself when she was a child. So she was only getting back what was intended for her and the other children she grew up with in the Bronx.

Pineapple is not naïve about the changes in her life—eating habits and the rest—that her diabetes will entail. But she keeps her head up high. And, in the midst of all of this, she hasn’t missed a day of class and she says she likes the courses that she’s taking this semester—“except for biology, where I’ve always had a problem. But I’m learning fast!”

She tells me that Mosquito finished freshman year in college with a 3.8 grade-point average and is working this
year as a resident assistant, and is playing basketball for her college team, on which, it seems, she’s something of a star. “She goes off almost every week for games with other schools.”

Her brother, Miguel, she reports, “has made a lot of new friends here since he got back from Guatemala. Lara takes good care of him. She does more than I do, since I have to study hard and keep up with my classes.” He’s in the seventh grade at the school in Providence that they selected for him.

Lara, meanwhile, “is doing really well.” Pineapple didn’t tell me whether Lara’s at the day care center still, but she says that Lara’s earning enough money to support her brother and herself and, Pineapple adds, helping me with college stuff when she can afford to.” She’s making plans, as she had intended, “to go back to school next year to get her certification as a teacher.”

It’s not so much in the long and substantive messages she sends, or in the thoughtful updates on the status of her family, but in the lively little texts and e-mails she’s been dashing off every couple days, that I can see that old familiar joyfulness and affectionate good nature that appear to be impervious to any kind of serious discouragement.

“Heyyy Jonathan! I hope all is well. How’s the new book going? School is going fine for me. Still having troubles in my bio class but I’m sure I’m going to pass. Hope I get to see you soon. Just wanted to say Hi!”

“Good morning, Jonathan. How ARE you guys? Just wanted you to know I’m real exciteddddd by the English class I’m taking. Also Poly Sci. Also in the process of looking for a second job. Miss you tons. Luv, P.”

“Heyyy Jonathan! I hope all is going good. I tried to reach you yesterday, but I had no luck. I know you’re working on your book. Hope it’s coming along okay. Pleeez make yourself take off some time to have a little fun.…”

“Dear Jonathan, I am NOT mad at you for not calling back. I just got worried when I didn’t hear. Lily told me that you’re crashing on your book. Believe me, I can understand. Late nite papers.… Okay! Got to get to my new job.…”

“Hi you guys! I had a nice weekend with my brother and my sister on her birthday. Except for a couple bumps, of which I will say no more. My father says HELLO FROM GUATEMALA.”

Pineapple’s good spirits help to bring me back to solid ground when I’m having difficulties with my work. As always, she gets peevish about maddening frustrations like the problem that she had about her health insurance. But she doesn’t often fall into the grim and gloomy moods that afflict so many other people who receive disturbing news. Or, in any case, she doesn’t let herself stay grim for very long. Soon enough, she climbs out of those moods, like someone in a running race who may stumble and fall down but springs right up again and thrusts a fist—“I’m not beaten yet!”—way up in the air. And, at those times when she can tell I’m in a gloomy mood, she reprimands me properly.

When I spoke to her last week, she detected instantly a sound of weariness within my voice and asked me whether anything was wrong.

“I’m fine,” I said. I explained that I was simply having trouble finishing my book. I said I wasn’t sure how much had changed back in the neighborhood where she and I had met, but I told her I kept going back and forth on this, because I didn’t want to end up on a dreary note.

“Jonathan,” she said, “I want you to think positive. Lara and I are going to go back and help to change things once we both have our degrees. You know? Make little changes that we can? If lots of people do that, then the changes won’t be little anymore.”