Fire in the Ashes Read Online Free Page B

her jubilation like a person looking for an object that she’d put away into a drawer somewhere andtemporarily could not be found. She laughed that nervous laugh, it seemed, when she was near the tipping point between exhilaration and surrender.
    In November 1996, a doctor called me from his office in a small town in Montana. He said his name was Dr. William Edwards. He told me that a group of people at his church had read my book Amazing Grace, about the children in the Bronx, and had called a meeting of their congregation. The members of the church, he said, decided that it was “appropriate” for them “to find a place in our community” for any family that believed they’d have a better chance in life in a setting very different from New York.
    I did not know how I should react to this idea at first. I’d never received a call like that from a total stranger and, although I knew almost nothing of Montana, I found it hard to picture any family that I knew beginning life all over in a place so far away, and so unlike New York.
    But the doctor’s explanations were so plain and simple—it was a nice town, he said, the schools were good, the congregation was prepared to find a house and fix it up and pay the rent at first and help out with the food expenses for a while, and he was a family doctor and had children and grandchildren of his own—that I told him I’d pass all this information on to Reverend Overall and that she would likely call him back if there was ever any interest from a family at St. Ann’s.
    I pass on a number of more modest offers and suggestions every year to ministers and teachers and other people working in poor neighborhoods and never know for sure if they’ll materialize. Some of them do. Churches and synagogues routinely ask me for the names of schools or churches in the Bronx and frequently they follow throughwith shipments of computers, books, and other educational materials. Religious congregations from as far away as Maine and Pennsylvania have invited groups of children from St. Ann’s to visit them for extended periods of time. But moving an entire family some 2,000 miles to a small town in Montana that I’d never heard of was in a different ballpark altogether.
    There’s another reason why I hesitated to respond to Dr. Edwards’s invitation. There is an intimidating rhetoric of cultural defensiveness in many inner-city neighborhoods like those of the South Bronx, which sometimes has the power to inhibit any actions that might tend to break down racial borders and to stigmatize the people who propose them as “invasive” or “paternalistic.” There is a kind of mantra that one often hears from local power brokers in neighborhoods like these that the way to “fix” a ghettoized community is, first of all, never to describe it in such terms and, second, to
remain
there and do everything you can to improve it and promote its reputation. Those who choose to leave are seen as vaguely traitorous, and those who help them leave are often seen as traitorous as well.
    Sometimes ideology and rhetoric like this can introduce an element of complicated and neurotic inhibition into issues that should be decided by the people they will actually affect. I wasted a few days debating whether to dismiss the whole idea and, at one point, I nearly threw away the name and number of the doctor. Then, to end my indecision, I sent the information he had given me to Martha and more or less forgot about it for a while.…
    A month later, in the middle of December, Vicky came into St. Ann’s in a state of desolation: beaten again, eyes purple, worried sick about her son, who was not attendingschool, worried about welfare, worried about clinic visits, worried about rent and food.
    The telephone in the office rang while she was sitting there talking to the pastor. “It was the doctor from Montana,” Martha told me later. I didn’t know if she had called him earlier that day or if the timing of his