That recognition stems from Kozol’s own circumstance. “I came to this book with a longing to find hope,” he says. “I needed to find some reason for hope.” That tells us much about how different the world looks at the age of 63 than it did 30-plus years ago when he taught fourth grade in Boston’s inner city.
A Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, Kozol had fancied himself a budding novelist, but like so many others in the ’60s, he was stricken with career-shifting idealism. That led to his teaching job, from which he was fired after reading the students a Langston Hughes poem titled “Ballad of the Landlord” not approved for their consumption. No black author whose works “involved suffering” could be taught in the school, a bureaucrat later told Kozol. Out of Kozol’s outrage grew “Death at an Early Age,” his tale of what it was like to teach black kids in a system where textbooks portrayed slavery as benign, black Africans as savages and South Africa’s apartheid government as an ideal democracy.
Kozol has not lost his outrage. But with a father suffering from Alzheimer’s and a mother in poor health, Kozol now prefers to focus less on the bleakness of his young subjects’ lives and more on the beauty of their spirits–as a way of lifting his own. “Ordinary Resurrections” is a portrait of the young children in the Mott Haven area of the South Bronx. Mott Haven is among the poorest and deeply segregated areas of the country, and suffers from an epidemic of asthma, AIDS, father absence and homelessness. It is a neighborhood, Kozol points out, where even the cats and dogs die young. Nonetheless, Kozol captures moments of childish joy and ambition among its young Latino and black residents: a young boy’s delight at a toy chirping chicken, a plump girl’s dreams of stardom as a supermodel.
I accompanied Kozol to Mott Haven and realized how deeply he has bonded with the community. When he steps into St. Ann’s, an Episcopal church with a thriving after-school program, the children greet him like a favorite uncle. The pastor there is one of Kozol’s heroes. A Radcliffe graduate and onetime litigator, the Rev. Martha Overall gave up the law and turned to the ministry when her brother died of AIDS. With its array of athletic, nutritional and educational programs, St. Ann’s is much more than a sanctuary. The children of Mott Haven, Overall observes, “don’t know what they’re up against in many ways. We can give them motivation to get the tools they need to survive.” Since the 1995 publication of Kozol’s previous book, “Amazing Grace,” which prominently featured “Mother Martha,” St. Ann’s has become something of a fashionable cause. The new computer lab, gym and playground were made possible, in large measure, by the light Kozol’s work shone on the church.
At PS 30, the grammar school next to St. Ann’s, the principal, Aida Rosa, greets the slight, bespectacled author like the old friend that he is. But in a quiet aside to me, outside a classroom, Kozol trots out some sobering statistics. The neighborhood high school, which most of the students will attend, he notes, has roughly 1,000 ninth graders, half of whom are repeaters; only 90 will make it to the 12th grade, and only 65 of those will actually graduate. Kozol’s ultimate and somber message is no different from what it has always been–that though some kids will beat the odds, as long as segregation, poverty and inadequate investment in education are facts of life, the young will needlessly suffer.
“Amazing Grace” concluded with an honor roll of death, a listing of people from the community, mostly young, who had perished, mostly violently. Kozol ends “Ordinary Resurrections” with an image of hope: with a child’s drawing of a rising sun. Yet, in the five years separating the two books, the problems of poverty, homelessness and AIDS have continued to fester in the South Bronx. Some new buildings have gone up, but not a great deal has really changed–except in the author’s restless, yearning heart.
