Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol Read Free Book Online Page B

concealed—but, even more, the vivid recognition that they are the objects of society’s avoidance or contempt—creates a panic that they can’t get air enough into their lives, into their lungs. This panic is endemic. The choking sensation is described repeatedly by many adults and their children. Physicians often hear these words, “I can’t breathe,” in interviews with homeless patients. I hear this statement again and again. Sometimes it is literally the case.
    December 23: Annie Harrington is lying on her bed. She has bad asthma. It scares her and her fear is realistic. Her father died of asthma several years ago. Her daughter suffers from it too.
    Her asthma has become much worse since living in the Martinique. Tension, she believes, contributes to it, but it is immediately provoked by climbing stairs. Her room is on the fourteenth floor. Despite continual requests, the hotel refuses to allow her to move to a lower floor.
    Every time she has to go downstairs to use the phone (she is obliged to contact realtors almost daily to live up to the requirement of “searching for a home”) she has to carry her baby on her hip, and then she has to climb all fourteen floors unless she wants to wait for 20 minutes for an elevator. She’s been taken to Bellevue three times after bringing groceries upstairs.
    On the night I visit she is in a state of misery with which I can identify, as I have asthma too. Climbing toher room, as I’ve done many times, forces me to use an inhalator.
    Her husband is a student in a computer course. He does his homework somehow in this room. He seems to be tender and patient and a bit in awe of her. They have been married seven years. Their children are Doby (seven), Eleanor (six), and Edward (a year and a half).
    For some reason, this has been a harder week for her than usual. She has had several bad attacks of asthma. While I’m in the room she starts to cry. Her husband holds her while the children stand and stare. She asks him to leave her for a while. He tries to dissuade her, joking about something; but she’s stubborn. “Let me be alone.”
    He pulls on a sweater and a coat and now he’s standing by the door. Doby has some kind of muscle weakness that affects his vision. He wears unusually thick lenses in big horn-rim frames. He stands between them, holding his mother’s and father’s hands at the same time.
    Annie’s husband finally shrugs, scoops up a notebook, and goes out the door. After he’s gone she looks at me and says: “I have a hard time breathing in this room.”
    Sociologist Kai Erikson, describing families who have lost their homes after a flood in Appalachia and are now entrapped in very crowded temporary dwellings, writes that “the pressures of life have drawn in so tightly” that they often feel they cannot breathe. They feel, he says, “as though they are always smothering,” and he quotes a woman in these words: “Sometimes … I’m just choking half to death … It’s just like something was wrapped around my neck. I’m sort of breath … It’s just a choking feeling. Just like everything is … tightening up.”
    When I go back a few days later Annie’s husband has returned. He’s reading on the bed beside the window.Annie is leaning on her elbow in the bottom of the bunk bed near the door.
    “It’s been four years we’ve been in and out of the hotels. Here for ten months. It seems like ten years.”
    She completed tenth grade, worked as a food caterer, met her husband when he was in military service. He had completed high school but did not have skills enough to find a job. The military offered to provide him with an education and job preparation, and he had believed this. They lived for three years at a military base in Texas. When his service was completed he could not find permanent work. The training he’d been given in the army was too narrow to prepare him for civilian jobs. He’d found some part-time jobs and, while these were