Kozol, J. (1995).Amazing Grace:
The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a
Nation. Crown
Publishers. New York, NY.
284 pp.
$15 ISBN
0-06-097697-7
Reviewed
by Shellie Jacobs
Duquesne
University
July 10,
2002
Amazing grace, how
sweet the sound....
This critique is not
just about a book called Amazing Grace. It is a critique
of the injustice of poverty. This is the type of book that gets
under your skin, haunts your nightmares and inspires people to
take up arms against the war that is waged against
children.
If you visit
Manhattan you are in the seventh richest congressional district
in the nation. The outlying area is the poorest. This is the
area known as Mott Haven in the South Bronx. It has been made
infamous by Kozol's eloquent descriptions of the tragic
situations in his books.
In this, the lowest
income area in the South Bronx, two thirds are Hispanic and one
third is black. Thirty-five percent are children. In 1991, the median
household income of the area, according to the New York
Times, was $7,600. (p.3) With a low socioeconomic level such
as this there are bound to be struggles. Through this literary
work we are introduced to many "characters", but they
are more real than the casts on reality television shows many
Americans watch huddled in front of their TV sets. One can get
lost in the accounts and believe they are reading fiction because
the stories are too brutal, engaging, and powerful for the
average person that sleeps snug in their warm beds at night,
blessed with things like electricity and good health.
One of the main
schools that is examined in this book is P.S. 65, and it is very
highly segregated. There is even a new term for how segregated
the New York schools are: "Hypersegregation." This
is a school in which all, with the exception of a few token white
children, are of Hispanic or African American descent. Written
up in the New York Times, the Harvard Study in 1993
compared school segregation in New York with that in other
states. This was the study in which the term "hypersegregation"
was first utilized and the phenomenon was finally recognized.
"A total of 200 in a school of approximately 3,200, "
are Caucasian. Almost a thousand students out of these 3,200 are
officially "discharged" for poor attendance or a
number of other reasons, including violent behavior, every year.
(p.151)
On the average school
day instead of just pledging allegiance to the flag and going
over the school roll, they have a slightly unusual morning
routine. The teacher coaches them by asking what the holes are
in the window and the students reply in unison,
"bullet-holes." They then go over a drill, very similar to
a tornado drill, where they practice getting down if they hear
gunshots. According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs,
students have certain needs that must be met before they are able
to learn in a school environment. How do children learn when
they are listening to the sound of their empty bellies rumbling
and listening to hear a bullet shot before it leaves the gun?
How can we demand high test scores and work completed correctly
when the personal hunger and safety needs of the students
continue to be unmet even in the classroom?
According to the
principal, there are many students who bring to the school
physical evidence of pain and hardship. Some wear their pain in
the form of the inhalers that almost every child carries for
asthma and some with burns from fires in their neighborhoods. He
explained, "Some of our children have been horribly
disfigured in fires. I notice, though, that the other children
treat them kindly and not make fun of them. There is a
protective feeling that can be extraordinarily moving. There is
nothing predatory in these children. They know that the world
does not much care for them and they try hard to be there for
each other." (p. 64)
Self-efficacy is not high in this
school and it becomes apparent when you hear the voices of the
children in this book. They see how others view their
environment. The self-esteem of children has been crushed to the
degree that students ridicule themselves, as David Washington
told Jonathan, by making a bitter joke out of the letters of the
school's name. "'Taft,'" they say means
"Training Animals For Tomorrow." (p.152) The
students see that they do not get an equal education compared to
other students in the city. These are not students who are
unintelligent; they were simply dealt a bad hand. The question
that one wants to ask is: What do other kids deserve and how is
the whole idea of a "deserving" or an
"undeserving" person used to mask some of the
cumulative consequences of injustice? (p.154)
There are children who
do not have bedrooms; but one adolescent named Anthony who
sticks out in this book as one of the hopes of Mott Haven
explains that he is not ambitious for a bedroom. He explains
that he is "ambitious for more books." Luckily,
towards the end of the book we learn that this insightful young
man just may get a chance to broaden his horizons because he will
be going to Jerusalem with the pastor from his church. Upon
reading this, the readers find themselves cheering inside. We
want these children to get out of this situation, to rise above
the poverty that is drowning them. Another young man that could
sing his sweet song of freedom from the poverty is named David.
In the book his grandmother explains that he has just been
accepted to City University with full financial assistance.
David's grandmother explains her feelings about this
fantastic news to Jonathan: "I'm happy," she
says, smiling through her tears, and she keeps saying it,
"I'm happy. Something good has happened, something
GOOD! No one can take that from him now." (p. 236) It is
the first time that Kozol saw her cry that way, without
embarrassment, without constraint, without trying to conceal,
because they were tears of hope for this generation.
That saved a wretch like
me....
"Nearly 4,000
heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV infected, live here.
Virtually every child at St. Ann's knows someone, a
relative or neighbor, who has died of AIDS, and most children
here know many others who are now dying of the disease."
(p. 4) These burdens are seen on the faces of the children and
in the stories that the adults tell about the horror of living in
this type of disease-ridden environment. It affects the
culturally diverse community deeply. In this city 9 out of 10
children who are born with AIDS are black or Latinos. (p.174)
AIDS creeps into the live of both unsuspecting drug users and the
quiet babies in the wombs of their mothers. The incubation
period for the development of AIDS in infants is, generally,
shorter than for adults. It is on average three years but most
die in 18 months. Only 5% live to be twelve years old. (p. 195)
These lives and the dreams they could have fulfilled are lost.
Those babies will never grow to be the Anthony who goes to
Jerusalem or the David who gets accepted into the college.
The parents too are leaving this
earth due to this virus. By the spring of 1993, 1,381 women and
3,428 and men in the South Bronx had been diagnosed with AIDS.
(p.194) According to the creator of the Orphans Project for
those children that are left alone due to the tragedy of AIDS,
"Only the great influenza pandemic of 1918 ... offers a
partial analogy from diseases of the twentieth century.... We
are only the beginning of this phenomenon. We do not yet know
the outcome." The Times refers
to this section of New York as the "the deadliest
blocks" in the "deadliest precinct" of the
city. (p.5)
Then there are the children and
parents who do survive a life of poverty surrounded by drugs and
AIDS. It is recognized that many children in poor neighborhoods
such as Mott Haven have been neurologically impaired, some
because of low weight at birth, some because of drug ingestion
while in utero, and many from lead poisoning in their
homes and also, shockingly enough, within their schools.
(p.155) The lead paint that is used in the schools is often old
and cracked and not maintained, and once again even the schools
become unsafe, not the havens that these children deserve as
American citizens.
"Why do you want to put so
many people with small children in a place with so much
sickness? This is the last place in New York that they should
put poor children. Clumping so many people, all with the same
symptoms and same problems, in one crowded place with nothing
they can grow on? Our children start to mourn themselves before
their time." (p. 11) In all of this sickness, the ratio of
doctors to patients in the area is 30 times less than in
Manhattan.
Where are the mentors, heroes and
leaders in this community? All you need to do is look around
and see who has the flashiest car, the gold chains, the snazzy
suit, and who has the ability to throw thousands of dollars into
the street. In Mott Haven, this man's name was George
Caldron. "He'd been a heroin user himself since he
was ten years old," explained a woman when describing the
local drug lord. "By 1986 or '87 he was renting
certain corners to the lower-level dealers for $200,000
yearly." This was a man who got others addicted and
brought down the neighborhood but he was a hero to some of the
once wide-eyed inquisitive children that had potential, that
stuck a needle in their veins with dreams of wiping away the pain
of poverty. However, the poet Mr. Castro explained, "when
he died, he was deeply mourned. His funeral was well attended.
The great hero of Paradise Lost, of course, was Satan. He
is much more interesting than the angels."
There are other heroes
in this neighborhood. Some are the mothers who, like angels,
oversee the community. Their tales are as harrowing as a
ten-year-old drug user. "I think of a woman, Charlotte
Smith, who this morning buried her fourth child but remains a
fighter, upright and unbroken. But good Lord! The miseries
around her are so vast." (p. 72)
I hear on the sidewalks people
sneering at the homeless and casually saying, "Get a
job." But what if like in Mott Haven, there simply are not
enough jobs? "The greatest need in the neighborhood is
real employment. Some of the men come in here and they want a
job so bad. You see it in their eyes. They ask. They question
me continually. I have to tell them honestly that there is
nothing her," explains the security director of a complex.
(p. 62)
I once was
lost....
Lost on the sea of poverty without
a paddle to steer them to safety, Anthony tries to examine why we
are here and why his peers can't move in the right
direction with their lives. "I believe that we were put
here for a purpose, but these people on the streets can't
see a purpose. There's a whole world out there if you know
it's there, if you can see it. But they are in a cage. They can
not see." (p. 24) When you can't see past the storm
because you know that you can't even find your compass, you
can feel very trapped, indeed.
The power of Anthony's
insights hits home because of the simple way that he states the
truth of his community. He tosses aside the political
correctness that runs rampant in our college courses and speaks
from his gut about his peers. "I feel afraid of my own
people, my own race, black people, students my own age. You step
on someone's foot or look at somebody the wrong way - if he
doesn't like your attitude, he might pull out a gun and
kill you." (p. 47) How can Anthony even leave the house
when he is so afraid of the dangers of the street and his own
people? Kozol's book does not hand us these answers,
instead he lets the reader formulate the questions and brainstorm
the answers.
There are other voices in this
text that tell the story this area of New York. One poet that
lives in the community paints a picture with his words. "I
see New York as a symbolic city," explains poet Mr. Castro,
"These buildings are our concrete prisons piled up like
Babel. A satanic technology surrounds us. What we see is
apparatus, not humanity." (p. 45) Mentions of feeling
trapped or imprisoned are peppered throughout the book adding to
the sense of claustrophobia and the impression that there is no
way out.
When Mr. Castro was asked by
Kozol why the children in the nazi camps came to his mind when
we were speaking of this neighborhood, he answers with a caution
I have heard from others, Mrs. Washington included, when a
reference to the holocaust was made. "It is not the
same," he says. "But there are some similarities.
There is the feeling of eclipse. There is the likelihood of
death for many. There is the sense of people watching from
outside but seeming paralyzed and doing nothing. And there are
the miracles." (p. 240)
The injustices in this community
are so great that they hardly ever utter the word
"injustice." Father Glenworth Miles explained the
reason for this, "How often do you speak about the air? If
something touches every aspect of existence, every minute of each
hour of your life, it needn't often be spelled out. But it
is always there." (p. 81)
Rats, like injustice, are a
constant threat to the people in this community. In the Bible it
says that during Armageddon, there will be 10,000 rats for each
person. "These rats are fearless. Light don't scare
them. Noise don't scare them. You can see them in the
park at noon. Any time you see the rats at noon, it's time
for people to move out." But even though these people
understand that the rats can be unhygienic and often disease
ridden, moving away without assistance can be nearly impossible.
Especially if you are a new mother, the tears of frustration may
be in vain because there is no way out of the horrific
situation. A mother tells of a seven-month-old boy who was
attacked by several rats that climbed into his crib.
"Doctor said he hadn't seen bite marks like that in
years. The baby's fingers were all bloody. I think it was
the third time that this baby was attacked. His mother's
terrified but can't move out. The city put her in this
building and she don't have any money to move anywhere
else." (p. 114)
When questioned about
what they are the most afraid of, a sixth grade boy replied,
"the rats with red eyes." One small girl with curly
hair and round plastic glasses replied, "Growing
up." A young Russian immigrant said, "What I hate
the most is the unfairness on this earth." Several children
answer, "Dying." (p.123)
But now I am
found....
I remember that my bedtime prayer
as a young white girl from an affluent upbringing huddled in my
bed was the traditional "Now I lay me down to
sleep..." that speaks of our souls going to heaven.
Kozol tells of overhearing the bedtime prayer of a pair of young
Mott Haven siblings. Standing in the doorway he listened to,
"God bless mommy, God bless nanny. God, Please do not
punish me because I am black."
Death is so close to the daily
lives of these people that they must see the silver linings.
When speaking a bout an eight-year-old year old child that has
been killed, a young mother in the neighborhood explained,
"God knows when somebody has suffered long enough. When it
is enough, He takes us to His kingdom. In heaven there is no
sickness. Here there is sickness. In heaven there is love.
Here, there is hate. On earth you grow old or else you die in
pain. In heaven you are young forever." (p.
106)
Children can often
speak through drawings easier than through words. Kozol talked
to children about their drawings that represented AIDS. These
are the drawings of the children whose lives are being touched
deeply by AIDS. "Meet Mr. HIV", wrote an 11-year-old
child, over a diamond-shaped face from which six scaly legs
extend. "He invades your body. This is what he looks like
when he does," another child writes over a scary-looking
monster that resembles a tarantula. An HIV-infected 12-year-old
draws a transparent yellow picture of his body filled with hairy,
blob-like creatures that resemble paramecia and amoebae.
"I hate you because you do bad things to my body,"
writes another boy. "Go pick on someone your own
size." (p.196)
Some children express their
feelings about death verbally. A five-year-old named Cassie,
with a grown-up's help, composed this message for her
mother, who had died some months before: "Mommy, I want
you to know everything.... I am going home from the hospital
today.... I am starting kindergarten next week. I am going
to wear my dress, which has flowers on it and is black.... I
wish I could fly [into] the sky to be with you."
(p.196)
The knowledge that a stigma is
attached to AIDS, however, keeps some children from confiding
thoughts like these to other children of their age. A
16-year-old whose mother has AIDS, which some children in New
York refer to as "the skinny disease," says that she
has "never told a single friend" about her
mother's illness. "It's like I always carry
this big secret...." An eight-year-old says that when
he feels afraid or sad while he's at school, he goes into
the bathroom, to a toilet stall, and flushes the water so that
nobody can hear him cry. (p.197)
What is beautiful to
these children? When asked, virtually all of them reply,
"heaven." Instead of the vacation spots and places
that children from higher-class homes would cite as beautiful,
they choose a place that they know that they could eventually get
to. How do they picture heaven in their imaginations? "A
peaceful place with only the innocent," replies one child.
(p. 125) Some of the children's visions of heaven were
portrayed in simple drawings. One drawing, by a ten-year-old
boy, showed a brick wall with a large gate in the middle. Above
it were eight puffy clouds. On each cloud there is a small stick
figure. Next to it is the word "me" with an arrow
pointing to his head. Another arrow indicates "my
friends." A drawing by a 12-year-old showed heaven as
"God's house" with a friendly looking sun
smiling above it. In front of the house were three angels with
wings, standing on clouds. A sparklingly happy young girl, named
Anabelle, explained what heaven is in the following
quote.
"People that are good go up
to heaven. People who are bad go down to where the Devil lives.
They have to wear red suits, which look like red pajamas. People
who go to heaven wear a nightgown, white, because they are
angels. All little children who die when they are young will go
up to heaven. Dogs and kittens go up to animal heaven. But if
you loved an animal who died you can go and visit with each other
on the weekend. In heaven you don't pay for things with
money. You pay for things you need with smiles." (p.
129)
I was
blind....
Cover it up. Hide it. We
don't want to know about it. The affluent don't say
this with words to this town, but they do it with action.
"The city had these murals painted on the walls, she says,
not for the people in the neighborhood—because they are facing
the wrong way—but for tourists and commuters.
"The idea is that they
mustn't be upset by knowing too much about the population
here. It isn't enough that these people have to be
sequestered. It is also important that their presence be
distinguished or 'sweetened.' The city did not
repair the buildings so that the kids who live around here could,
in fact, have pretty rooms like those. Instead they painted
pretty rooms on the facades. It's an illusion." (p.
31)
Kozol explains that if he
talked with his white upper class friends about whether or not
they "impose" this life on these people they would
react with statements about how they simply got to New York,
worked hard at their jobs and settled into their homes. He
states that, "This is that great luxury of long-existing
and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major
city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on
anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move
in."
Some of the older
generation of Mott Haven have seen too many times the acts of
charity that the upper class people provide when it will make the
rich feel best, for example, the food that they donate on
Christmas. "What gonna happen on December 26? Who is this
charity for? In a way it's for themselves so they won't
feel ashamed goin' to church to pray on Christmas Eve.
Maybe they think this way they won't end up in hell. We
have our hell right here on earth. They'll get theirs
after their last breath." (p. 44)
Caucasians typically speak about
the "they." The "they " that are
referring to, as the cause of problems in the white neighborhoods
is the African Americans in neighborhoods like Mott Haven. The
residents in this area of New York have a different viewpoint.
The "They" that is the issue is the decision makers
that make the wrong choices according to an insightful adolescent
named Isabel from the South Bronx can cover a multitude of
bases. "When we talk about the people who are making these
decisions, we keep saying 'they' and most of the time
we think of 'they' as being white. We don't
even know who 'they' might really be, yet we keep
saying 'they.' This is because we have no power to
decide these things. Something's always happening where
the last and final vote was not the one we made. So we say
'they did this' and 'they' seems
extremely powerful, but we do not know who 'they'
are." (p. 40) Isabel explains that the ones who make the
decisions that are so vital to how the community lives are the
welfare workers, healthcare workers, or police. She also alludes
to the fact that she realizes that they do not have the true
power because " they" do not run the city, the
politicians do.
What strikes me as
incredibly ironic are the accounts of the feelings of the people
in this section of New York City about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Because this was written in 1995, the effect of the World Trade
Center bombing had yet to become the horrifying realty that it is
now. The views of the mayor two months into his term could be
strikingly different to these people if it was written now.
However since this is a critique of a book that was written
before the terrorism that hit the nation so hard, I must explain
why they felt the way that they did at the time and what they
felt. "The Nation's Mayor" who is helping us
to rebuild our lives and faith in our country, was to them the
man that cut back sanitation, inspection services and programs
for children and teenagers, the early stages of what would prove
to be, "wide-sweeping cuts in a variety of services relied
on by poor people, as a consequence of the most drastic cut backs
in the city's budget since the Great Depression." (p.100)
"The man turns flowers into stones," is how a
neighborhood man explains Giuliani. "He is too dry and
brittle, like the cold judiciary out of which he came. He has
the mechanism of the law, but not its spirit. He tells the
beggar, 'Don't sleep on the grass.' He should
explain, 'This grass is sacred. Don't defile it. It is
the banquet of our Creator.' It may be he does not
understand the human factor. He is too absolute. There is
something missing in his personality." One of his top
deputies suggested that all the people on welfare including
dependent children be forced to wear green uniforms and clean up
graffiti and pick up papers. These are the same things that the
people in the South Bronx prison have to do. Is it any wonder
why when asked about the new hairstyle in the neighborhood that
is termed "25-year- to-life" a young boy replied, "You
don't have to be in jail to be in prison."
In fact, for some
prison can be the safest and warmest place to reside. A nun
explained that a woman "begged us to not take her out of
prison ... until her baby was delivered, because there was a
four-month waiting list for prenatal care at Lincoln
Hospital." This nun wonders, "Is this what we do?
Incarcerate people so that they can get the services that they
need?"
Those babies that are
born in prison, what life will they encounter? Reverend Overall
feels that it is not quite different from "being born in
any other ghetto if you know it's where you'll probably
die." He explains that the racial makeup of the prisons
and Mott Haven is virtually the same. (p. 147) Prisons,
churches, and schools are probably the most segregated
institutions in our nation. New York City schools are often even
more segregated than the prisons.
What is wrong with the
"ghetto life?" According to Jonathan Kozol, himself,
"So long as there are ghetto neighborhoods and ghetto
hospitals and ghetto schools, I am convinced that there will be
ghetto desperation, ghetto violence and ghetto fear because a
ghetto in itself is an evil and unnatural
construction."
But now I
see....
Kozol's honesty
with himself regarding the emotions that boil up inside him as he
interviews are blatantly obvious because he writes with such
heart and candor. The following passage describes a moment when
he felt a bit overwhelmed by the power of the qualitative studies
that he constructs....
"I soon forget to take notes
and almost forget that I am here in search of information. I
find myself searching for something other than information but I
can't tell what it is. There will be other evenings like
this in the year ahead. Often during times like these I have to
fight off feeling that I am about to cry. I do fight it off
because I don't want to be embarrassed. Outside the
apartment, when I leave, I sometimes give in to these feelings,
which I never can explain because they do not seem connected to
the things that we talk about. It's something cumulative
that just builds up during a quiet time." (p.
46)
The deep melancholy that Kozol
feels is evident also in the children who reside in Mott Haven.
Manuel Rodriguez, the principal of P.S. 65, explained that in the
last two weeks he had had three serious suicide threats due to
the depression of his elementary school students. He had one
sixth-grade student who " stays up until four A.M. He
takes a shoe and hammers at roaches all night long. He's
not destructive, just so terribly unhappy." A parent
explains that she was trying to get her child help with
depression through the psychiatrist, "I put her name down,
but her teacher said they couldn't see her for a long time
because there are many children like her in the school."
(p. 65)
Death continues to
create a deep hole in the lining of the fabric of the community.
When an eight-year boy falls to his death in the elevator shaft
of his apartment building while he is playing, the city does not
run to take care of the building's damage so that it does not
happen to a child. I think of the uproar that I saw on the
television when a young white child was struck by a car while
playing when in the suburbs and injured. The news coverage was
extensive and a streetlight was put in almost immediately.
Instead of the city taking a proactive step for the welfare of
other students, the city blamed the family. This is what was
explained to Kozol through a letter, "...for
letting an eight-year-old go in the hallway. But they got to go
somewhere." Going "outside" means going in the
hallway because the real outside is simply too dangerous.
Kozol's view of where Bernardo played for the eight years
of his life is, "The kennel where I live is cleaner and
smells better. The kennel also has a place where dogs can go
outside and have some fun in the fresh air."
The deaths of the
young children were so common place that while he wrote this
Kozol had to find a system for keeping the deaths straight.
Those kids who were once filled with life and exuberant energy
quickly became symbolic pins in a map of south Bronx. He used a
symbolic coding system, one for death by fire, one for death by
accident, and one for death by gunshot.
The whole final
chapter of this book is titled "In Memoriam."
Included in this chapter are the obituaries for those who lost
their lives in Mott Haven while Kozol was conducting his study.
Twenty of the people mentioned were mere children.
Buried today and everyday until
the world takes notice of this forgotten part of New York City
and the other areas of the world in which poverty is a way of
life, is the innocence of children. It is time to stop the
crushing blow of poverty from taking the life of these kids
before they reach adulthood. Children's laughter and joy
is being extinguished, as if the flame that Lady Liberty holds so
proudly is being put out. It must be relit with education and
adequate funding before it is too late.
References
Harvard Study. (December 14,
1993). School segregation in New York versus other states. "New
York Times."
About the
Reviewer
Shellie
Jacobs is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of
Foundations and Leadership at Duquesne University. She teaches
Educational Psychology I and II, Cultural Diversity,
Instructional Planning and Assessment. She is a Research
Assistant in the Center for the Advancement of the Study of
Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Her research and speaking
engagements focus on cultural diversity, the arts, and students
with special needs. Her current research interests center on the
effect of the arts on students with exceptional needs.
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