“Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.” By Jonathan Kozol, Crown 288 pp.; $23
I remember my first visit to Egypt. I was met at the airport late at night. I was taken to a beautiful hotel. I couldn’t really see much, but I did notice that at least the final quarter of a mile of the trip was along a road bordered by an ornately decorated ten-foot-high plaster wall. And the next morning I found out why. I discovered that my four- or five-star hotel was planted right next to one of Egypt’s worst slums. The creative folks in Cairo had simply walled off the slums so that you were living in luxury, and you could look out from your room onto this zone of squalor and deprivation.
The columnist Clarence Page recently described a visit he made to the Dominican Republic. He said he felt like he was witnessing America’s future: grinding poverty next door to breathtaking opulence.
Jonathan Kozol has seen these situations up close; he has written about what he has seen, and it has accrued to the benefit of all of us who have been reading him for a while. His first book, “Death at an Early Age,” based on his experience teaching fourth grade in a segregated Boston public school, won the National Book Award. With “Illiterate America,” he drew attention to the scandal of widespread adult illiteracy. “Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America” changed our perception of the homeless. And, 30 years after the civil rights movement, “Savage Inequalities” documented the persistence of segregation and gross inequities in funding for our public school systems.
Now, in “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,” Kozol has returned with a personal look at the children who are being raised on the other side of the wall from America’s opulence in America’s poverty. It’s the story of a neighborhood in the South Bronx, Mott Haven. Forty-eight thousand people live there, and the median income is $7,600. Last October in Chicago I talked with Jonathan Kozol about the book and particularly about the luminous faith of the children he met in Mott Haven.
WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR CAREER, IT’S OBVIOUS THAT SOMETHING ABOUT ISSUES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE GRABBED YOU EARLY ON. WHAT WAS IT THAT FIRST DREW YOU TO THOSE ISSUES? AND WHAT HAS SUSTAINED YOU IN THAT COMMITMENT?
Well, I had a religious upbringing. I’m Jewish, and my mom and grandma were religious, but, as happens to many people who go on to places like Harvard College, that got washed out of me very quickly. At Harvard, you didn’t talk about religion. Even if you believed in God, you didn’t mention it, because people would make fun of you.
I went on from Harvard to Oxford, where I had a Rhodes scholarship. And then after a few years I came back to the States, in 1964, to Boston, my hometown. I probably would have done something normal like going to medical school or law school if it hadn’t been for the civil rights movement. In the summer of ’64, you’ll remember, those three young men were killed in Mississippi–two white, one black. One of them happened to be Jewish, from New York. And I identified with him.
So one day I just got on the subway. The end of the line was Harvard Square. I went to the other end, which was the ghetto of Boston, and signed up and became a teacher of little kids–black kids in a segregated school. And, in a sense, that was my formative decision. I didn’t think of it that way. But, in a sense, that 20-minute ride took me to a place from which I’ve never returned.
When I wrote “Amazing Grace,” I replayed that same experience 30 years later, in New York instead of Boston. I got on the subway in the richest part of Manhattan, right in front of Bloomingdale’s. If you’ve been to New York, you know where that is–15 E. 59th St., the richest section of the richest city in the world. And 15 minutes away is the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in America. I ended up spending most of two years talking to children there. I’ve always preferred talking with children to talking with grownups.
WHY ARE CHILDREN A WINDOW TO TRUTH FOR YOU?
I didn’t think of it this way at first, but I now believe that if you’re seeking God, you have to look in the eyes of a child. And if you can’t find a child, you should try to find the child in yourself. Now, I look for real children. I love to be with children, even the poorest kids–and most of my adult life has been spent with very poor black and Latino kids in our big cities.
The children in South Bronx are certainly the poorest and sickest children I’ve ever met. The South Bronx has the highest rate of asthma in the United States, pediatric asthma, because there are so many toxic installations there. New York, like many cities, tends to put its sewage plants and its waste burners and all its dump sites in the places where the poorest black and Latino kids live, because we don’t really value their lives.
You have kids who are already sick, already very vulnerable, and then a huge, medical-waste incinerator is built right next to where they live. It was supposed to go in the ritzy part of town, in Manhattan, but the white parents there have clout. They were told it would pose a cancer threat to their babies, and respiratory dangers. So they resisted it. Naturally, it ended up where the poorest children live, in a neighborhood that has the worst medical facilities in the city. New York’s hospitals are completely segregated, as its schools are. In fact, New York is as segregated today as Mississippi was 40 years ago.
And one other thing that I must say, because of the age we’re living in, this neighborhood also has the highest AIDS rate in the developed world. One-quarter of the mothers here are HIV-positive. So you can imagine what the pediatric AIDS rate is like.
Despite this, a lot of the younger children speak with a transcendent beauty and charm and innocence that can take your breath away. Most of the kids I met there do not speak in obscene words. They don’t speak like rap singers. They don’t call women whores and bitches. These are beautiful children. And I particularly like to be with the little kids because they aren’t dirtied yet by what we’ve done to them.
I often say these children are not yet soiled by the knowledge that their country does not like them. Many of them will be soiled in time, because they’re going to discover that when they get a little older. But at this age, they still believe in God and they believe in humanity, and they even believe in the United States.
I’ll tell you, as a grownup it’s hard for me to believe in all those things sometimes because I see so much injustice. But the children speak of heaven all the time. They speak of God. They ask tough questions. “If God is good, why does he let the innocent die?” They always want to know what heaven is like, and I want to know, too. I ask them all the time. I’m very susceptible to children’s words.
A little girl told me to my delight that dogs will go to heaven. I had just lost a beagle I’d had for ten years. And you know how you can mourn for a dog. When she told me that, I was so happy. I said, “Do we live in the same place?” She said, “No, the dogs go to animal heaven.” But seeing I was distressed by that, she said, “You can visit on the weekends.” There’s a childish charm in that, but there’s also something deep in it, because this is a little girl who values love. She loved her dog, and she needs to believe there’s a heaven for her dog, too.
I need to believe in heaven. I’m still probably a little bit agnostic. Going to Harvard makes you skeptical. But I long to believe in heaven now. It seems unbearable to think that there won’t be something wonderful for these children after they die, because the lives we give them in the slums just aren’t enough to justify existence.
We’re familiar with organizations that say they work with the poorest of the poor, but when they talk about that we think of Somalia or Bangladesh. Yet the poorest of the poor also live among us in the U.S., though they are an avoidable reality for most of us. You don’t have to get on the subway at Bloomingdale’s and end up in the neighborhood that you chose to end up in.
In the course of their everyday lives, very few white, middle-class Americans have much intimate contact with the poor. They might see them on the street and shy away from them because it frightens them to see the homeless, for example. And because they don’t go into poor neighborhoods, I think they accept stereotypes–for example, that all the inner-city mothers, many of whom are single parents, have bad values. You hear that all the time–“bad family values.” To me, that has no connection with reality. The mothers that I’ve met in Mott Haven, and the grandmothers especially, are the rock of this neighborhood. They’re some of the most religious people I’ve ever met in my life.
Alice Washington is the central woman in my book–an HIV-infected woman who did nothing wrong, got it from her husband. She has more religion in her left thumb than many of the severe right-wing TV preachers I hear. There are women in Mott Haven who are scared to go out at night to church because the streets are so dangerous. One woman said to me, “I don’t need to go to church. I pray right here.” And in front of me she kneels down in the kitchen and prays. I’ve had women sing gospel music to me in their kitchen–including the song “Amazing Grace,” which gives the book its title, of course.
I said to one woman–because I keep asking these questions–I said, “Do you really think God hears you?” And her answer was so strong. She said, “God hears. He sit up high and look low, even here.” I never heard that kind of absolute faith in God expressed in the privileged white suburbs where I grew up. Never in my life had I heard that before.
SPEAKING OF BREAKING STEREOTYPES, YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN YOUR BOOK WITH A BOY NAMED ANTHONY, WHO DOESN’T FIT THE STANDARD IMAGE OF A GHETTO KID. YOU ASK HIM WHAT HIS LIFE IS LIKE, AND HE SAYS, “I’M EDGAR ALLAN POE.”
I met him on the street. He was 12 then. He couldn’t pronounce my last name, but he liked my first name, because it’s from the Bible. He said, “Mr. Jonathan, my life is like the life of Edgar Allan Poe.” I looked at him, and I said, “How is your life like Edgar Allan Poe’s?” He said, “Because he had not a very happy life, and neither do I.” He often inverts words that way. I don’t know why he does it–it’s a quaint, poetic style.
IT’S ALMOST BIBLICAL, LIKE THE OLD KING JAMES VERSION.
Yes. This is a wonderful boy. He talks about heaven all the time. He’s the first child who’s ever told me about what he calls God’s kingdom. I said, “Why isn’t this God’s kingdom? Why shouldn’t God’s kingdom be right here on earth?” And he gestured toward the street, toward the drug dealers and the poor addicts for whom there’s no treatment in New York, the poor heroin-addicted men who do no harm to anyone. They’re just desperate. They’re standing there in despair, some of them crying in the street. He looked out, and he waved his hand like a little prophet–like Jesus. (He was about the same age that Jesus was when he first preached in the synagogue.) And he said, “This here is not God’s kingdom. God’s kingdom is a place of glory. This is a place of pain.”
I’m Jewish, and being Jewish is important to me, but I was drawn repeatedly into the church in Anthony’s neighborhood. Actually, I would go into the church at vespers every night I could, because otherwise I’d cry in the street. And I didn’t want people to see me crying.
SOME PEOPLE HAVE SAID THAT THE BLACK CHURCH EXPERIENCE IS JUST AN ESCAPE, THAT IT’S NOT REALLY EQUIPPING OR HELPING THOSE LIVING THERE.
That’s baloney. That’s just not true. And I’m of the generation that grew up in college reading Karl Marx, who said that religion is the opiate of the people. Let me tell you, in this neighborhood, religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium is the opiate of the people. There’s plenty of it. You get all the heroin you want there.
The churches in this neighborhood, particularly Saint Anne’s, which is an Episcopal church, are a blessed sanctuary. What they offer is no opiate. It’s political. The priest at Saint Anne’s is a white woman who went to the same college I did. She went to Harvard College. She went to law school. She was a Wall Street lawyer. And she gave it all up in the middle of her life when her brother died of AIDS. She asked for the poorest ministry in New York City. She is my idea of a modern saint.
And she is not just a sweet lady priest who pats children on the head and feeds them, though she does that. She keeps these kids from starving. Anthony was eating cold oatmeal for dinner when I met him. She feeds him. She feeds all these kids. But it’s not just that. She also talks tough about politics.
And when she speaks of sin, she doesn’t just mean the sin of the drug dealer or the sin of promiscuous sex. She’s much shrewder than that. She talks about the sin of the powerful white people in New York, her Harvard classmates and mine–the financiers, the powers on Wall Street, the banks that have red-lined New York and created this ghetto in the first place–and she uses the word sin. She says this isn’t just a “problem.” This is a sin in God’s eyes.
She’s very tough on the mass media. She condemns the “New York Times” because it lacks the moral courage to speak forthrightly against segregation in New York. It’s embarrassing for New Yorkers to admit that the city simply accepts as a matter of course what we condemned in Mississippi 40 years ago.
Copyright © 1997 by Christianity Today/Books and Culture magazine.
