The Company He Keeps

“I do pray-but not out loud. I pray inside. I pray for something I haven’t done for thirteen years. To pick up my knitting needles...If you ever see me get my needles out again, you’ll know I’m feelin’ happy” - Vicky

“A play...called Les Miserables, opened to acclaim in the theater district of New York...People were paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children from another era. The last thing that they wanted was to come out of the theater at the end and be obliged to see real children begging on the sidewalk right in front of them.”

“The people who come to visit at St, Ann’s...believe that every child, of whatever race of economic situation, is of equal value...but, in the eyes of those who exercise real power in New York, it seemingly is not.”

“some of the children are virtually bursting with poetic creativity when they are six years old.”

Elio “can be quick to show that he does not like...that particular singsong voice that grown-ups sometimes think they ought to use when speaking to young children.”

Erika’s “intellect, morality, and loyalty to other children still burn brightly” even though she’s aged and learned her realities.

“There is a great deal of this automatic and insightful kindness in the hearts of many of these children...acquainted with unusual degrees of loss and sorrow.”

Piedad “cries at times for reasons no one knows...Teachers who have spent their lives with children of this age know what to do...They’ll sometimes get down on the floor and...hold her like that for a while. I guess I didn’t...think that Piedad would have accepted it from me.”

Pineapple “can be assertive also when she talks to grown-ups and seems unaware that she is often going just a bit too far.”

Pineapple “passes out the pencils to the children at her table, saving the one she’s [accidentally] sharpened to a stump for last, then [gives] it to a boy she doesn’t like because he teases her for being plump.”

“Two women, different from each other is so many ways- their race, their background, and their education- give each other a lot of strength somehow. The children give the grown-ups strength as well.”

“Some of the children also wait [for the priest Mother Mary] in the morning if there isn’t food at home.”

10 year old Ariel will sometimes, “do something or say something...which has a subtlety and tenderness that seem to be quite natural to her.”

“We have a gym but it is for lining up.” - Student in the Bronx

we do not have things you have. You have clean things. We do not have...You have parks and we do not have parks...can you help us?” - Alliyah, age 8, the Bronx

“Self-help programs don’t work. Some work stunningly well [but] effective solutions to ghetto pathologies cannot be crafted by blacks walled off from a larger America.” - Ellis Cose

“If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel? I think they’d by relieved.” - Isabel, age 15.