Read Online Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jonathan Kozol
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within the Martinique can be a complicated task, calling for strategic skills that few of us can easily imagine. With only a hot plate in a crowded room, every item (meat, potato, vegetable) must be prepared in sequence. So the children have to eat each item separately and must pass back their plates to be refilled. From start to finish, a single meal like this may take two hours.
In most rooms, moreover, there is not enough space for a mother, father, and their children to sit down and eat at the same time. I have yet to see a room in this hotel that has a dinner table. I have never visited a room that had as many chairs as occupants. At best, the occupants may sit together on a bed or, if the bed’s too crowded, on the floor to share their food. It may be a tribute to the stubborn dignity of many people that they do exactly that. Some even say grace and thank God for their blessings before dining off the carpet or linoleum.
Drawing a distinction between home and shelter is, I hope, more than an academic exercise. Shelter, if it’s warm and safe, may keep a family from dying. Only a home allows a family to flourish and to breathe. When breath comes hard, when privacy is scarce, when chaos and crisis are on every side, it is difficult to live at peace, even with someone whom we love.
In the months in which I’ve visited the Martinique, I’ve seen several previously close couples torn apart by quarrels that evolve out of sheer human density within a single room. Children, of course, cannot be sent outside to play when parents are distraught. Where would they go? “Outside” is a hallway or an elevator landing strewn with garbage or a stairway frequented by guards and by narcotics dealers. Holding a family together in the face of these conditions is an act of nerve.
It would not be accurate to say that Annie’s family is ahappy family. No one living in the Martinique Hotel has ever hinted to me that he or she was happy. It is a genuine family nonetheless. It is affectionate and strong and warm. But how much battering they have to undergo—how many alarms and illnesses and tensions. I’ve been back to visit many times. I have never been within this room when somebody did not have trouble breathing.
* Data here and elsewhere in the book are for the time span indicated in the text. Many of these items fluctuate from year to year.
3
Three Generations
T here are families in this building whose existence, difficult though it may be, still represents an island of serenity and peace. Annie Harrington’s family has a kind of pained serenity. Gwen and her children live with the peace of resignation. I think of these families like refugees who, in the midst of war, cling to each other and establish a small zone of safety. Most people here do not have resources to create a zone of safety. Terrorized already on arrival, they are quickly caught up in a vortex of accelerating threats and are tossed about like bits of wood and broken furniture and shattered houses in an Arkansas tornado. Chaos and disorder alternate with lethargy and nearly absolute bewilderment in face of regulations they cannot observe or do not understand.
Two women whom I meet in the same evening after Christmas, Wanda and Terry, frighten me by their entireinability to fathom or to govern what is going on inside and all around them.
Terry is pregnant, in her ninth month. She’s afraid that, when she gives birth, she may not be able to bring home her baby from the hospital because she is not legally residing here.
Wanda, curled up like a newborn in a room no larger than a closet, is three months pregnant, planning an abortion.
Would doctors say these women are emotionally unwell? They might have no choice. Were these women sick before they came here? I don’t see how we could possibly find out. What startles me is not that they have difficulty coping but that neither yet has given up entirely.
Terry: twenty-eight years old. She has three kids. She
In most rooms, moreover, there is not enough space for a mother, father, and their children to sit down and eat at the same time. I have yet to see a room in this hotel that has a dinner table. I have never visited a room that had as many chairs as occupants. At best, the occupants may sit together on a bed or, if the bed’s too crowded, on the floor to share their food. It may be a tribute to the stubborn dignity of many people that they do exactly that. Some even say grace and thank God for their blessings before dining off the carpet or linoleum.
Drawing a distinction between home and shelter is, I hope, more than an academic exercise. Shelter, if it’s warm and safe, may keep a family from dying. Only a home allows a family to flourish and to breathe. When breath comes hard, when privacy is scarce, when chaos and crisis are on every side, it is difficult to live at peace, even with someone whom we love.
In the months in which I’ve visited the Martinique, I’ve seen several previously close couples torn apart by quarrels that evolve out of sheer human density within a single room. Children, of course, cannot be sent outside to play when parents are distraught. Where would they go? “Outside” is a hallway or an elevator landing strewn with garbage or a stairway frequented by guards and by narcotics dealers. Holding a family together in the face of these conditions is an act of nerve.
It would not be accurate to say that Annie’s family is ahappy family. No one living in the Martinique Hotel has ever hinted to me that he or she was happy. It is a genuine family nonetheless. It is affectionate and strong and warm. But how much battering they have to undergo—how many alarms and illnesses and tensions. I’ve been back to visit many times. I have never been within this room when somebody did not have trouble breathing.
* Data here and elsewhere in the book are for the time span indicated in the text. Many of these items fluctuate from year to year.
3
Three Generations
T here are families in this building whose existence, difficult though it may be, still represents an island of serenity and peace. Annie Harrington’s family has a kind of pained serenity. Gwen and her children live with the peace of resignation. I think of these families like refugees who, in the midst of war, cling to each other and establish a small zone of safety. Most people here do not have resources to create a zone of safety. Terrorized already on arrival, they are quickly caught up in a vortex of accelerating threats and are tossed about like bits of wood and broken furniture and shattered houses in an Arkansas tornado. Chaos and disorder alternate with lethargy and nearly absolute bewilderment in face of regulations they cannot observe or do not understand.
Two women whom I meet in the same evening after Christmas, Wanda and Terry, frighten me by their entireinability to fathom or to govern what is going on inside and all around them.
Terry is pregnant, in her ninth month. She’s afraid that, when she gives birth, she may not be able to bring home her baby from the hospital because she is not legally residing here.
Wanda, curled up like a newborn in a room no larger than a closet, is three months pregnant, planning an abortion.
Would doctors say these women are emotionally unwell? They might have no choice. Were these women sick before they came here? I don’t see how we could possibly find out. What startles me is not that they have difficulty coping but that neither yet has given up entirely.
Terry: twenty-eight years old. She has three kids. She
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