Free Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol Page A

called [pronounced very precisely] hypoglycemia.”
    I meet Terry one year later by sheer chance outside Grand Central Station. She’s in a food line for the sandwiches distributed by a charitable group at 10:00 p.m. Her kids are with her. She’s holding a baby in her arms. She tells me she’s in another hotel near the Martinique. “Don’t have no refrigerators there …”
    I lose her in the crowd of people waiting for a meal.
    In the subway station under Herald Square a woman who has seen me coming from the Martinique follows me and stops me by the stairs. Her hair is disheveled. Words spill from her mouth. She says that she was thrown out of the Martinique. Her children were sick with diarrhea. Someone “reported” her; for what I do not ask. After the Martinique she says that she was in a place I’ve never heard of called the Brooklyn Arms. Her youngest child, one year old, became much sicker there. City workersfinally persuaded her to give up all three kids to foster care. She’s living now in a crowded women’s shelter where, she says, there are twelve women in a room. She shrieks this information at me on the platform not far from the shrieking trains.
    “There’s no soap, no hygiene. You go to the desk and ask for toilet paper. You get a single sheet. If you need another sheet you go back down and ask them for some more. I sleep on an army cot. The bathroom’s flooded.”
    Is she telling me the truth? Is she on drugs? Is she unwell? Why did she elect to tell me this? Why do the words come out so fast? I feel unkind to cut her off, but I am frightened by her desperation. I leave her there, pouring out her words into the night.
    The nurse in the Martinique says this: “A mother gave birth last week to a baby that weighed just over a pound. She was in her seventh month. Her children rubbed her belly while she cried. I called an ambulance.”
    The nurse is kind, compassionate, and overwhelmed. “People are fractured by this system. I’m responsible for 500 families, here and in another building. Custody cases. Pregnant women. Newborn children. I can get them into WIC. I’m snowed …” She’s on the telephone, buried in papers, talking with women, hearing their questions, trying to come up with answers. There are others like her in the crisis center who create a tiny zone of safety in the larger zone of fear. But twenty-five hardworking nurses like this woman would be scarcely equal to the miseries that flood across her desk out of this factory of pain and tears.
    Far from any zone of safety lives a man named Mr. Allesandro. He’s six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds—down 20 pounds from late September. When he came to the hotel a year ago he weighed 165. I first met him in theballroom before Christmas when I handed him an apple. One bright apple. One week later he does not forget and, when he sees me in the lobby, asks me if I have some time to talk.
    His two daughters are asleep. Christopher, his nine-year-old, is lying on the top bunk, fully dressed and wrapped beneath a pile of blankets, but he is awake and vigilant and almost belligerently alert. It’s a cold night and the room appears to be unheated. Mr. Allesandro shows me a cracked pane of glass that he has covered over with a sheet of garbage plastic and Scotch tape. The two coils of the hot plate offer a symbolic reassurance (“heat exists”) but they do not provide much warmth. He’s wearing a coat and woolen hat. His mother, who is seventy-three, lives with them; for some reason, she’s not here.
    There aren’t many men as heads of households in this building; this fact, I think, adds to his feeling of humiliation. His story, quickly told, remains less vivid for me later on than certain details like his trembling hands, the freezing room, the strange sight of his watchful boy, unsleeping on the bed. The boy reminds me of a rabbit staring from a thicket or caught in the headlights of a car.
    These, as Mr. Allesandro tells me, are the