Amazing Grace

In the early 1990s, the South Bronx and its neighborhood of Mott Haven constitute one of the poorest, most racially segregated urban areas in the United States. Journalist and author Jonathan Kozol spent more than a year visiting this community, talking with its children, mothers, clergy, and social workers. The book interweaves their voices with statistical evidence and social analysis to argue that American society has abandoned its most vulnerable citizens, concentrating them in neighborhoods defined by disease, violence, and despair.

Kozol opens by establishing the geography of inequality. The Number 6 subway train travels 18 minutes from one of the richest congressional districts in the nation to the poorest. Mott Haven, population 48,000, has a median household income of $7,600. Thirty-five percent of its residents are children. St. Ann's Episcopal Church, three blocks from the Brook Avenue station, serves people its pastor describes as "the poorest of the poor" (3). Kozol catalogs the conditions pervading the area: crack-cocaine and heroin addiction, nearly 4,000 HIV-infected heroin users, widespread pediatric AIDS, rampant asthma, squalid housing, and extreme violence. He poses the questions driving his investigation: What is it like for children to grow up here? Do they believe society has shunned them? What enables some of them to pray?

On a summer afternoon in 1993, a seven-year-old named Cliffie took Kozol on a walking tour. He pointed out stuffed animals tied to a tree, casually mentioned having seen a boy shot in the head nearby, and led Kozol to a medical waste incinerator on Locust Avenue that burned amputated limbs and syringes from 14 hospitals. The incinerator was placed in Mott Haven after wealthier parents on Manhattan's East Side blocked a similar facility in their neighborhood. Cliffie paused to use an asthma inhaler. Back at the church, his mother voiced a question Kozol would hear repeatedly: Why does the city concentrate so many families with small children in such a diseased place? In the evening, Kozol returned to what locals called "Children's Park," where addicts injected drugs, volunteers distributed clean needles, and children played on a jungle gym nearby.

Kozol introduces Alice Washington, an HIV-positive woman living on Boston Road with her son David, a high school senior. She recounted the deaths of neighbors, including a nine-year-old girl named Sylvia who was raped and died of AIDS, and described the appalling conditions at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, where she once sat in a crowded waiting room for two days before leaving because exposure to infections endangered her weakened immune system. Kozol provides Mrs. Washington's biography to counter assertions that poor people are poor because they behave irrationally: She finished high school, studied bookkeeping, worked for nearly 20 years, contracted AIDS from her husband, developed cancer, and became too frail to work. After nearly four years in homeless shelters, the city relocated her to the South Bronx. Her son David called Kozol late one night, questioning whether God is powerful enough to stop "the evil on the earth" (23) and defining evil as people with power pretending they have none so they need not help others.

At a Covenant House storefront program, children articulated their perceptions of segregation. A 12-year-old named Jeremiah said life in predominantly white Riverdale is "opened up" while where he lives "it's locked down" (32). In Harlem, teenagers described feeling hidden and disposable. A 16-year-old named Maria said that if their neighborhood's residents simply disappeared, the rest of New York would be relieved. Her half-sister Isabel compared the experience to being placed in a garage where unwanted things are stored and forgotten. The students rejected conspiracy theories but offered a systemic analysis: Weave enough bad things into a community and life will not be good.

Through fall and winter, Kozol deepened his portrait. Mrs. Washington's daughter Charlayne lived in a building where dealers carried sawed-off shotguns on the stairs. She had taught her children to drop to their knees and crawl when gunshots erupted. At bedtime, her children, ages five and six, prayed: "God bless Mommy. God bless Nanny. God, don't punish me because I'm black" (69-70). Kozol met Juan Bautista Castro, a Puerto Rican poet living on St. Ann's Avenue who taught himself English by reading Longfellow and Whitman, and who calls New York "a symbolic city" where the poor's "banishment has been accomplished" (75-76). He also met Anthony, a 12-year-old aspiring writer and acolyte at St. Ann's, who compared his neighborhood's plagues to Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and declared, "This out here is not God's kingdom. A kingdom is a place of glory. This is a place of pain" (84-85). During the Christmas Eve service, two gunshots rang out behind the church doors; the congregation assessed the situation and proceeded to sing and take communion.

Through 1994, Kozol tracks the intersection of personal suffering and public policy. Mrs. Washington spent four nights on a hospital stretcher before getting a room and was again denied SSI (Supplemental Security Income) benefits despite having AIDS. Eight-year-old Bernardo Rodriguez Jr. died in the elevator shaft of his Diego-Beekman apartment building after a broken door opened when he leaned against it. His death was connected to reduced housing inspections: The city had cut inspectors from 700 in the 1970s to 213. A series of fatal apartment fires claimed more children's lives, coinciding with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's budget cuts to drug rehabilitation, lead-poisoning prevention, rat control, and hospital staffing. A deputy mayor called the reductions "a victory for everybody" (100).

Kozol provides broader analytical context. New York's schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Stuyvesant High School, housed in a $150 million building, enrolls only 9 percent Black and Hispanic students, while P.S. 65 in Mott Haven has one white child among 800 and ranks 627th out of 628 elementary schools in reading. Kozol links school failure not to innate ability but to environmental causes: lead poisoning, prenatal drug exposure, absence of preschool education, and uncertified teachers. Asthma hospitalization rates in Mott Haven are more than five times those of predominantly white Riverdale, and the ratio of private doctors drops from 60 per 1,000 south of Manhattan's 96th Street to two per 1,000 at Brook Avenue (171-172). A nurse explained why residents did not travel to better Manhattan hospitals: For them, the trip was not like coming home but "more like heading out to sea" (175). Kozol warns that so long as the most vulnerable people are consigned to places the rest of society shuns, "educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be virtually inevitable" (162).

On an extended afternoon walk, Anthony introduced Kozol to his uncle, who had AIDS. The boy described a man who went out but "stays inside himself" (212), eating licorice all day but falling asleep into his soup at dinner. Anthony wrote in a closet with a flashlight and ate cold oatmeal from the box for dinner. When asked what it would take to make New York a place where children do not cry, he replied, "You'd have to go to somebody who owns New York" (219).

In a final extended conversation, Mrs. Washington revealed that David had been accepted to City University with full financial aid. She cried openly for the first time Kozol had witnessed: "Something good has happened... No one can take that from him now" (210-211). She challenged the concept of "compassion fatigue" and predicted that if conditions did not change, violence like the Los Angeles riots could erupt. At two in the morning, she walked Kozol to the subway station. He hugged her and felt panicky about letting go.

In an epilogue, Anthony gave Kozol a handwritten report on heaven: "No violence will there be in heaven. There will be no guns or drugs or IRS" (237-238). His uncle Carlos died that October, and Anthony read from Revelation at the funeral. Mrs. Washington, in a final evening together, revised an earlier statement: "I don't think they wish that we would die. I think they wish that we were never born" (246). Kozol closes with a bleak meditation, doubting those in power will be transformed by conscience, predicting they will "write more stories about 'Hope Within the Ashes' and then pile on more ashes" (230).