The hopeful years: Children of the South Bronx

Christian Century, May 10, 2000 by Jonathan Kozol

APRIL 10. A SUNNY afternoon, but cool. The kids are in the big room at St. Ann's, an Episcopal church in New York's South Bronx. They are finishing their homework during the after-school program.

Pineapple is struggling with the electric pencil sharpener next to the closet on the left side of the room. Eight years old, she huffs and puffs as she keeps putting the same pencil back into the sharpener, then looking at the point with obvious dissatisfaction, then putting it back in again, until it's down to almost nothing. She keeps staring at it with an irritated look, as if she knew that this was going to happen.

When she's done, she passes out the pencils to the children at her table, saving the one she's sharpened to a stump for last, then giving it to a boy she doesn't like because he teases her for being plump.

"This is s'posed to be a pencil?" asks the boy.

"Don't answer him," she tells the other children.

Grown-ups who spend time here with Pineapple comment on the confidence with which she uses her assertiveness to issue little orders like this to the other children. I can never tell why they obey her. Pineapple doesn't seem to understand the reason either, but she never seems reluctant to accept the power that the other children, girls especially, invest in her, and she deploys it with comedic ease, as if she finds it funny that they let her exercise so much authority in coming to decisions.

"You sit here. You can sit over there," she says, arranging children at a reading table in one of the study rooms upstairs.

"Why is Raven way down at the end?" I ask.

"I don't know why. She asked me where to sit. So I said, `Sit right there!'"

She doesn't seem to suffer any grave concern about the fact that she's so plump. She talks about it more with puzzlement, or petulance, as if she thinks that unknown forces in the world conspire to expand her waistline but that her healthy appetite has no connection with this.

"She has a nice compactly packaged personality," the pastor noted once as we were watching her among a group of other children. A pleasant kind of managerial assertiveness is very much a part of the completed package.

She can be assertive also when she talks to grown-ups and seems unaware that she is often going just a bit too far. She talks to me at times as if, between the two of us, she is the one in charge of things and simply asks me for a small degree of logical cooperation.

"Please tell me to do my work," she says to me one afternoon.

"Okay," I say.

She pats the seat beside her; I sit down. Next, she opens a spiral pad in which she's written her assignment for tonight and places it in front of me. Then, with her pencil in her hand, she waits for me to read her the assignments.

"Spelling book--pages 65 and 66."

She opens her spelling book and finds the page, looks up, and asks me, "Next?"

"Mathematics--pages 83 and 84."

She opens her mathematics workbook.

"Next?"

"Phonics lesson--'ess' sounds. Write them out."

She digs into her backpack, finds the phonics book, and spreads it open on the table. Finally, with all three books in front of her, she gives me her "approval" sign--thumb and finger in a circle--and begins to work.

She works for 25 or 30 minutes, asking me a question when she runs into an obstacle. She gets confused, for instance, in her mathematics homework, which is four-column subtraction, and she now and then reverses letters when she does her spelling lesson, studying a word she's copied out and telling me she thinks that "it looks funny," then erasing it and doing it correctly; but, for most of the half hour, she works on her own and moves each book aside once she is done with it.

When she's finished, she places her notebook against her mathematics workbook and aligns them with each other, then aligns them with her spelling book and phonics book and slips them all into a certain section of her backpack, which she then zips shut. The neatness in the way she does this and the close fit of the three books and the notebook in the space she has assigned them seem to give her a good feeling of completion. When she zips her backpack shut, it feels definitive.

"Okay. That's it," she says. "I'm done."

She puts her pencil and eraser in a side compartment of the backpack and gets up and, in this way, she brings the period of work to its conclusion.

She can speak sarcastically to other children and can, frankly, be a bit too blunt at times. "Your face is shiny, girl!" she said one afternoon to somebody whose mother had rubbed oil on her skin. "You could borrow the sun's job!" Usually, however, there's an element of foolishness that rescues her sarcasm and her jokes from real destructiveness. Like many of the children, she's alert to times when other children are too fragile to sustain the give-and-take of repartee; and when, as often happens at the afterschool, one of the younger children suddenly begins to cry, or seems to be right at the precipice of tears, she switches gears almost immediately.

One afternoon she and seven-year-old Elio finish their homework. Nancy lets them go upstairs with me and with a girl named Piedad to play a spelling game before it's time to eat. Just as the three of them are getting settled in their chairs, however, Piedad begins to cry. There's a cubbyhole between some colored cardboard boxes that are piled up to function as bookcases. The seven-year-old child climbs right in somehow and curls up in a ball and doesn't answer when I ask what's wrong.