Firefight

New York City

1988–mid-1990s

In 1988, when Michael Marshall and Paul Washington first met, New York City’s Department of Personnel was on the cusp of administering another one of its highly competitive firefighter exams. This one was numbered 7022, although only the Department of Personnel understood the logic of its sequencing. When exam time came, the turnout in general was low: only 14,620 candidates took it. Blacks made up 10.85 percent, roughly 1,600 candidates. That year, both the physical and written tests were given ranked grades, with the two scores averaged into one final list number. The city set the passing score at 70 percent.1

But just passing the test wasn’t going to do much for the applicants. To really have a shot at getting on the job within four years—at which point the city would scrap the 7022 hiring list and start the process over with a new exam—they had to get a score that ranked them in the top 5,000. And even that was no guarantee. On any given hiring cycle, the FDNY only absorbed as many firefighters as it needed. That usually averaged about 2,400 roughly every four years. In each cycle there were thousands of high-scoring, well-qualified candidates who never got called. And many would be eliminated by medical problems, background problems or other technicalities. The long, drawn-out and burdensome process of becoming a New York City firefighter didn’t end with a high score. That just ranked everybody by their grade for a prolonged waiting game. For test 7022, there were 112 blacks in the top 5,000—about 2.24 percent. By 1995, when the city officially stopped hiring from that list, 2,256 firefighters had joined the ranks of the Bravest from exam 7022. Of those lucky few, 29 were black, less than 1.3 percent. It was a drastic drop from the 10.85 percent of blacks who started the process.2

Washington and Marshall were angry and dismayed by the dismal numbers. In 1990, blacks made up 29 percent of New York City’s population, and unemployment was rampant after a decade of extreme financial and racial upheaval. The city had spent most of the 1980s trying to battle back from its abrupt and nearly complete financial collapse a decade earlier. Almost overnight, it seemed, the city changed from a hazy mix of middle- and working-class neighborhoods to a city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and it boiled with racial tension. The city’s black and Latino communities were caught in a cycle of joblessness and hardship unlike any seen since the Great Depression. In the 1970s, 311,841 blacks lived below the poverty line; by the early 1980s it was 452,030 and growing. Compounding the situation, all but 14 percent of the city’s black poor lived in what were known officially as “poverty areas.”3 In other words, the bulk of the city’s poorest, marginalized blacks lived firmly in its urban ghettos, places like Harlem, the South Bronx, Bushwick, East New York, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

From the mid-1960s into the late 1970s—the FDNY’s infamous “War Years”—fire haunted the poorest sections, turning derelict old buildings into insurance payouts for avaricious landlords looking to cash out. The firehouses in these neighborhoods became the stuff of legends. Crews would turn out for two, three, even sometimes four fires a night. Some of them were arson, but others were just the byproduct of callous and calculated neglect: electrical fires from bad wiring, kitchen blazes from families who turned on the oven because they had no other heat, deadly conflagrations that grew from cigarettes that fell into mattresses, and even some fires that were deliberately set—not for money, but by bored, frustrated youth who had nothing better to do than watch something burn. The constant, frenetic pace had firefighters in affected areas jumping round the clock—making them the most sought-after firehouses among pumped-up young smoke eaters eager for experience. Some of the same neighborhoods their parents or grandparents had fled from a few decades earlier became highly competitive places to work. The majority of firefighters commuted in for their shifts, and at the end of each tour they left the city—and its problems—behind. They returned to suburbia, usually Rockland, Westchester, Orange, Suffolk and Nassau counties, as well as Staten Island.

The adrenalin thrill of battling big fires—and saving lives—was the main lure that pulled the firefighters toward the busiest houses, but there were other, more practical benefits too. High-profile rescues earned praise and commendations from superior officers. Commendations and medals turned into extra points when it came time to take the civil service exams for officer positions. Lieutenant was the first rung on the fire department’s long promotional ladder. Two steps above that was battalion chief, with a generous, eight-day-a-month schedule and six-figure salary. It was not a bad way to wind up a long and fruitful career—for those blessed enough to get through the hazards of the job. In the 1960s and ’70s, with half the city going up in flames at any given time, it wasn’t hard to land in a hustling firehouse. But as the worst of the crisis burned itself out, and property values started slowly rising along with improvements in fire prevention technology and regulations, those coveted spots became harder to get. Some firefighters waited years for the transfer they most desired. The only ones who seemed to go straight from probie school into the action were those who had a hook—the firefighting term for a high-ranking friend or relative who could pull the right strings.

Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the remnants of the prolonged inner-city blight were evident to any firefighter who worked outside the ring of Manhattan’s upscale neighborhoods and commercial centers. It bothered Washington and Marshall and the Vulcans in general that in the poorest areas of the city, where steady employment was desperately needed, the communities rarely—if ever—saw a black face on the back of a fire engine.

“They all need jobs, good, solid, well-paying jobs. If we could get these kids better access to the tools they need to pass the test, they can get on the FDNY,” Washington would say to Marshall when they met up. The two firefighters were part of a group of Vulcans studying together to take the upcoming promotional exam for lieutenant in 1992. The city was also prepping for another entry-level firefighter test around that same time, and the Vulcans were doing what they could to help black hopefuls prepare.

“It’s gonna take another a lawsuit,” Michael Marshall would reply calmly. It was a frequent refrain from him. Six years Washington’s senior, already a father and with more time on the job, he had his own idea of what it would take to bring more young blacks into firehouses. But for the moment he was content to let Washington test his mettle against the traditional ways of the fire department. Washington wasn’t opposed to bringing a lawsuit against the city, but he wasn’t convinced it was the best route for the Vulcans to take. It was going to cost a lot of money, for one thing.

“Let’s see what we can do ourselves, by really trying to go out and recruit and help these kids all the way through the physical,” Washington said. “I think we can get more blacks into the department, a lot more. It’ll be like a wave.”

“A wave, huh?” Marshall laughed. “Okay, let’s give it a shot.”

Nobody knew better than Washington the positive effect a civil service job could have on a family, for multiple generations. His dad, Cornelius Washington, was one of thousands of World War II vets who returned home after serving overseas determined to break the terrible grip of poverty that followed him and his ancestors out of slavery. He signed up for the firefighter civil service exam and found work as a bus driver until the FDNY called him up. When he walked through the door of his first assignment, Engine 69 in Harlem in 1956, his family was already on the path toward a comfortable, middle-class life. About a year later, he was transferred to Engine 154, a firehouse on Staten Island, where he and his family lived. Paul Washington grew up in a humble neighborhood known as Dog Patch, about ten miles away from Engine 154. On Staten Island, he was just one of thousands of cop and firefighter kids. Inside the boundaries of his neighborhood, his dad was one of two firefighters—the other one being Washington’s Uncle Benny. Washington’s family stood out not for its blackness but for its comparative affluence. His parents owned a beautiful house—built from the ground up by his dad and his uncles—and eventually two cars. His mother, Thelma, was a devout Catholic from Nassau, Bahamas, and raised him and his older siblings, Kevin and Lynn, in the faith. The Washingtons were able to send their kids to a private Catholic school. Not all the families in his neighborhood could afford to do the same.

The Washingtons’ little haven in Dog Patch, no more than eight blocks wide and six blocks long, was one of the few areas on the island where black and white families commingled. Outside that zone, the forgotten borough, as it was often called, had clear lines of segregation in the 1960s and ’70s. Neighborhoods north of the expressway tended to be a mix of black and white families, while the south was mostly if not entirely white. Flares of racial animosity sometimes beset the island, which operated like a proud backwater town to the more sophisticated city that dominated its skyline. As a kid, when Paul and his friends rode their bikes beyond Dog Patch, they sometimes found themselves in areas that had been tagged with a warning graffiti sign, “NNL,” for “no nigger land.” They sometimes got chased out by adults, who would scream racial slurs at them and hurl soda cans. It wasn’t anything new for the boys—Paul got the same treatment on his newspaper delivery route by passing cars. He grew hardened to it, but the steady barrage of racial animosity that he and his friends had to deal with left them wary and distrustful of whites.

He assumed his father was fighting some version of those same battles in his daily life at the all-white Engine 154. But he could only assume, because his father, known as Buddy, almost never spoke about his work. Paul visited the firehouse just one time, with his sister, and that was it. Cornelius Washington was the only black among Italians and Irish, and he busied himself as much as he could tending equipment a cordial distance from the kitchen hangout.

“Is that what firefighting is like, Dad?” Paul had asked once, transfixed by a made-for-TV movie, Firehouse. It featured a black man—actor Richard Roundtree, better known as the titular detective in Shaft—who had to survive among the white majority. His dad had looked up from his newspaper and glanced at the screen, where artistically sweaty and soot-streaked firefighters were able to carry on conversations in the thick heat.

“No, not at all,” he’d said, burying his head back in his paper. Despite his reserve, the impact of Cornelius Washington’s job on the family was profound. All the kids grew up with the sense that their father’s work was something special. Not only did he race into buildings and save lives, he had plenty of time to work second jobs, which he always did. As they got older and more tuned into financial realities, they became aware that he was free from the burden of saving for retirement; he could provide for his family and he and his wife could get their kids to college. In his entire working life with the fire department, he never once worried that his paycheck wouldn’t arrive. If Buddy nursed a hope that one of his children might follow in his footsteps, he kept it to himself and let them make their own choices. Thelma urged them to aim higher. She also fought fiercely to keep them from internalizing the racism around them. “You go back tomorrow and you tell them, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’” she told Paul after his first day of Catholic school, when one of his white classmates taunted him about his race. She wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself, and she didn’t want her kids to be either.

“Why just a firefighter,” she’d say to her son, when he started to show a serious interest in the job. It was a fairly common attitude among many black firefighter and cop families of the post–World War II generation. Having gotten the job that launched them into a higher socioeconomic status, they had aspirations of their children climbing even higher, becoming lawyers, doctors, even politicians. But Paul—along with his older brother Kevin and his two older cousins Gary and Mark, sons of his Uncle Allen—was hooked. Just like the thousands of white FDNY candidates before him who had followed a dad or an uncle into the firehouse, he simply couldn’t imagine a job that would be any better.

That was the message he took to the streets with Michael Marshall as the duo began trolling Brooklyn and Queens in the 1990s. Armed with a card table, two wobbly chairs and a stack of specially printed index cards, they set up shop whenever and wherever they could on their days off, stopping any likely looking black youth and making their pitch to have them apply to the fire department. Other Vulcans would join them or go off to different corners in groups of two. At the end of each excursion, Washington entered any cards that had been filled out into a computerized database of prospective candidates. The Vulcans planned to follow up with each and every one—that was the only way to make sure the kids had really completed the application and made an effort to prepare for the upcoming test. For many inner-city kids, the way to pique their interest was through their wallets, Washington discovered.

“You see any firefighter on an engine, riding off to work, I guarantee you if he’s five years on the job he’s making nearly $50,000, with overtime,” Washington would tell them. He liked to run through the medical benefits, the saving programs that helped grow families and put kids through college, even the generous retirement plan. By then, if the kid was still listening, he’d trot out the biggest perk of all: a firefighter’s incredibly short working schedule.

“Guess how many days a month you’ll have to work,” he’d say. “Eight. No, no, no, I’m not kidding you. You will work eight 24-hour days a month. Anything after that is overtime.”

If any of his firefighter brethren had happened to be near the Albee Square Mall on Fulton Street during the many times Washington and Marshall broadcast that news, they likely would have run over and clapped their hands over the Vulcans’ mouths. There were many FDNY benefits that inspired envy among other city employees and regular workers—very few got the bountiful salaries, benefits and pensions of cops and firefighters. But probably none was lusted after as much as the eight-day work month. The firefighter practice of stacking shifts into 24-hour rotations—known as “mutuals” to the rank and file—had been around for decades. It allowed a standard 40-hour work week to be compressed into just a few days of round-the-clock service. The FDNY sometimes, as a disciplinary tactic, threatened to suspend the privilege. But mutuals had become so fundamental it wasn’t clear if firehouses could function any other way. The unwritten rule among the Bravest was to avoid talking about their good fortune lest some city bean counter somewhere decided to mess with the tried-and-true system.

“You can spend time with your kids, go back to school, get a law degree, hell, you can open up your own business on the side,” Washington would say, detailing just how many firefighters were also licensed carpenters, electricians, plumbers, even in some cases airline workers.

“Why do you think so many firefighters own bars?” Washington would joke. But it was true, many firefighters set up and ran clubs and bars, and used their off-duty brothers to sling drinks and double as bouncers.

“Think about this: you apply now, let’s say you get on in the next five or so years. In the FDNY, you can retire after 20 years, so you’ll be what, 42 by then? You’ll be retired at 42 with a solid pension, and in the meantime you’ll have earned good pay, built a family and gotten yourself educated and maybe even set up a second career,” he’d say, using the patter he and Marshall had perfected. “It can’t get any better than that.”

It wasn’t hard for Marshall and Washington to sell kids on the benefits. But they discovered it could be a bit more challenging to sell them on the lifestyle.

“What’s it like in the firehouse? I don’t wanna be in there with all those white guys,” was a frequent question.

The answer was complicated.

In the early 1990s, the city remained in the grip of the prolonged and widespread racial and class divide. It was still suffering the fallout from a string of NYPD incidents that enraged the black and Latino communities, plus three high-profile deaths of young black men by white mobs, starting with Willie Turks. The 34-year-old transit worker was dragged from his car in Gravesend, Brooklyn, on June 22, 1982, and savagely beaten to death on Avenue X. He and two other black transit workers stopped there to buy bagels on their way home from work. In 1984, the same year a vigilante named Bernard Goetz shot four black men on the subway who he claimed were going to mug him, NYPD cops shot Eleanor Bumpurs twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. They were trying to remove the mentally ill grandmother from her city apartment for falling $98 behind in her rent. Two years later Michael Griffiths, a 23-year-old from Trinidad who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was hit and killed by a car in Howard Beach, Queens, while trying to escape a white mob that had chased and beaten him and his two friends. It sparked a highly charged march in the mostly white and insular community a week later. Al Sharpton, then a little-known civil rights leader decades away from his improbable leap to national prominence, led a crowd of 1,200 mostly black demonstrators around the block while police held back the crowd of shouting, angry locals. It was just a few years after that, in 1989, that five young black and Latino youths were arrested and charged with brutally assaulting and raping a 27-year-old white female investment banker who was jogging in Central Park. The case inflamed an already unruly city and cemented the worst prejudices and suspicions on either side of the racial split. Screaming newspaper headlines said the suspects had been out “wilding.”4 The word was invented for this crime, and it meant the boys had been out tromping through the park looking for opportunities to terrorize and pillage. Within black and Latino communities, the initial shock gave way to outrage and accusations as details emerged of intimidation and trickery in soliciting confessions from the young teens, all under age 16 except one. Set against the backdrop of a racially charged mayoral election—three-termer Ed Koch running against black challenger David Dinkins in the Democratic primary—the case of the Central Park Five reached into every corner of the city and set the politicians chattering about the simmering problems of the new underclass. When a 16-year-old black boy, Yusef Hawkins, was shot to death by a white mob in the predominantly working-class Italian section of Bensonhurst on August 23, 1989, the city exploded. Hawkins had gone to the neighborhood with two friends to inquire about a 1982 Pontiac car for sale. The group was attacked by ten or so white youths armed with baseball bats and guns who were lying in wait for a black teen they suspected of dating a neighborhood girl. When the mob saw Hawkins and his friends, they jumped them. Hawkins was fatally shot twice in the chest. A month later, Koch was voted out by fed-up New Yorkers. They hoped Dinkins, who became the city’s first black mayor, could do something to soothe the roiling hostility.

The bristling anger seeped into just about every aspect of city life, and that included its firehouses. Only an idiot would think that life behind those big red doors was untouched by the city’s larger, more complicated realities. And the truth was, black firefighters never knew what they would face in the FDNY—and for that matter, no firefighter did. It was all luck of the draw.

Sometimes Washington would share a little bit about his days as a probie, when he endured that time-honored rite of passage of being hazed. His first year at Engine 7 in Lower Manhattan, his company decided it would be funny to turn the hose on him as he and a senior guy played basketball on the court outside. The crew roared with laughter while Washington took a silent soaking. It crossed his mind to give his grinning colleagues a lecture on the negative symbolism of hosing down the only black man on the court, but he swallowed the words. The joke wasn’t motivated by anything racial; it was the typical firehouse stunt to bother the new guys. But one veteran firefighter, who didn’t hide the fact that he didn’t care much for Washington, was among those doing the spraying. He enjoyed it a little too much for Washington’s taste. Even though Washington knew probies were supposed to take what was dished out and not complain, he didn’t like the ill will lurking under the pretense of good-natured hazing—and he decided to push back with a joke of his own. Washington found his target sitting in the firehouse kitchen a few hours later, reading a newspaper. The probie quietly filled a bucket to the brim, after making sure the water was good and cold. Then he dumped it over the seated man’s head. It made a huge splash, and the rest of the house screamed with laughter as they rushed to the kitchen and saw the older firefighter at the table, feigning indifference, thumbing through his wet newspaper.

The young probie was pleased with his revenge, but if he’d been wiser in the ways of the firehouse, he’d have known that some form of retribution was coming. The senior firefighters couldn’t let an upstart turn the tables on one of their own—no matter how funny the result. A comeuppance was due. One night, not long after the bucket incident, Washington ran upstairs through the peaceful firehouse to go to sleep around 2 a.m. The night owl probie usually kept late hours. As was firehouse practice, he left the lights off as he entered the pitch-black bunk room so as not to wake up the rest of the sleeping crew. He lay on his bed and closed his eyes. Seconds later, a strange plopping sensation feathered over his face and chest. Something was falling on him. He jumped up and ran to the bathroom, stopping dead when he caught his reflection in the mirror in the dim light. He was covered in fluffy white dust. A powdery halo enshrouded his head and shoulders and coated his hair. Someone rigged a bag of flour over his bunk to spill on him when he lay down, he realized. Enraged, he stormed into the next room where he knew the older firefighter he’d dunked with water was sleeping. Washington was sure he was behind the late-night flour shower. He kicked the man’s bed to wake him up.

“You think you got some kind of problem with me then why don’t you get up and we’ll deal with it!” Washington shouted, his chalky figure leaning over the blinking and bemused man. “Get up! I’ll kick your ass,” Washington said to the sleepy firefighter. He cursed and called him names when the man refused to move. The rest of the house was silent as Washington raged. He was so peeved he went down to the kitchen and scrawled a message on the blackboard, calling the firefighter a coward and a punk and challenging him to step forward and admit what he’d done. After leaving it where everyone would see it in the morning, Washington returned to the bunk room and showered off. It was only later that he learned the man he’d accused of the stunt hadn’t been involved. But everyone else in the firehouse chortled under their blankets as Washington, white flour spattered across all six feet of him, stomped through the place on a shouting tear. When his sense of humor recovered, Washington laughed about it too.

What he didn’t say to young kids he was recruiting was that sometimes the silly, childish pranks firefighters loved to play on each other—and particularly on probies—could go too far and take on a sharper, more offensive edge. He didn’t tell them that some particularly cruel houses would appoint a firehouse goat. Life was hell for whoever the firefighters decided they didn’t like, and the goal was to make the goat transfer out at the earliest opportunity. A goat couldn’t let down his guard for a second, and usually broke under the pressure within a few weeks. He didn’t say that sometimes the firefighters who would run into danger to save a black family without a moment’s hesitation would later crack jokes or make derogatory comments about the inner-city communities they served, while some black firefighters—if there were any around—pretended not to hear.

If Washington had wanted to, he could have told his potential recruits about the time he’d been detailed to a firehouse not far from his regular assignment. When he sat down for the communal dinner, he was the lone black man at a table of 11 whites. He listened to the popular, jocular lieutenant in charge—a man everybody liked and respected—entertain the crew with a tale about his college-aged daughter and the time she came home for the weekend with a new set of friends, including a young black male. The joke centered on the officer’s suspicion the two were dating, and his fumbling attempts over the weekend to figure out the true state of their relationship.

“I ain’t got nothing against black people, but I certainly don’t want my daughter to marry one,” the lieutenant laughed as he delivered his punch line. The table roared, except for Washington, who sat without moving. His mind flashed the hundreds of black people living and working right outside the firehouse doors. Nearly a dozen white firefighters were there eating with him and none of them heard anything wrong in what the officer had just said.

“What specifically is it you wouldn’t like about your daughter marrying a black man?” he asked the lieutenant, when the chuckles died down. “Is it that you’d have to sit down with in-laws who were black? Accept a black family into your family? What exactly is the problem?”

The room was silent for a second, then the table erupted as the men jumped in to defend the officer. Washington gladly took them on.

Washington didn’t tell potential new hires that during his first challenging years on the job, when he was stuck at a slow house in Manhattan with only a few real fire calls, he made a hobby out of getting into long, intense racial discussions with the rest of his house. Firefighters had a general rule of not talking about politics, religion or another colleague’s family—but truth be told, the third point was the only one any of them actually followed. The Vulcans always warned new recruits when going into firehouses to stay silent when firefighters teased each other about their ethnicities and cracked stereotypical jokes about Irish and Italians. Washington got that advice when he started too. A firefighter who laughed at someone else’s joke about the Irish left himself open to the same kind of cutting humor when the focus turned on him. Washington never participated when those sorts of teasing taunts started to fly. But he wasn’t willing to overlook a racist remark, whether it sprang from ignorance or a desire to be deliberately hateful. That’s why, when he was again filling a vacancy in a Brooklyn firehouse, he jumped up and ran into the kitchen when he heard somebody joking about who was going to be the nigger that night.

“Excuse me?” he said to the three white firefighters who were trying to figure out who would be responsible for doing all the cleaning and scrubbing. He’d been sitting in the common room off to the side, about to turn on the TV, when the kitchen talk had reached his ears.

“Oh man, I’m sorry,” said one of the firefighters, offering his hand to shake. “We forgot you were here.” Washington ignored the hand, but zeroed in on the comment.

“So if I weren’t here, what you just said would be okay?” he said. “It’s okay for you to call the person who has to do all your grunt work the ‘nigger’?” Before he knew it, the officer on duty and all the other firefighters were in the kitchen, arguing with him.

Later, he found out from another white firefighter who didn’t especially enjoy the particular camaraderie of that crew that it was a regular ritual to appoint a “nigger” for every tour. It was one of a handful of times he heard that word thrown around in a firehouse when others didn’t know he was in earshot. The offender always apologized when confronted. But it didn’t take long for Washington to discover that his eagerness to delve into taboo topics was more than matched by many other firefighters, mostly whites but some Latinos too. He often found himself in the kitchen, debating fiercely with one or two or sometimes a half-dozen white firefighters, who were dying to get their feelings out. The talks got heated and could boil on for a whole day, ebbing and flowing around training drills and emergency calls. Sometimes, at Engine 7, his good friend Bobby Smith would join him in the kitchen. The two black men would stand together and take on everyone who wanted to voice an opinion. Not everyone in the firehouse liked these hot-tempered free-for-alls. Many times a white firefighter would enter the kitchen, hear the ruckus, and walk back out.

The arguments would range over a host of issues, sometimes related to the news events of the day, often centering on what many of the firefighters saw as the special treatment black candidates were getting from the Vulcans and Mayor Dinkins. And there was still bad blood about the 1973 lawsuit that forced a hiring quota on the city for four years. Yet no matter how hot the arguments got, the firefighters steered carefully away from slinging any slurs directly at Washington—although he suspected they had plenty to say about him when he was not around. There was only one time a firefighter dropped the n-word during an argument, and Washington immediately drew him up short.

“Let me hear you say that word one more time, see what happens to you,” Washington said, as the man backtracked. But most of the time, there was no need for fists, or even the threat of them, and Washington much preferred fighting with his words anyway. He’d grown up on an island full of the sons and daughters of cops and firefighters. He never considered himself part of the glorified FDNY brotherhood, but he knew exactly how to zing them.

“Special treatment? You think black firefighters get special treatment? Those glasses you’re wearing look pretty thick to me. How’d you get past the vision test? Maybe your daddy made a call down to headquarters for you?” he said to one visually challenged firefighter who joined the kitchen fray to complain about handouts to minority candidates. The man flushed red with rage. Washington relished the moment.

Another big complaint Washington heard was that blacks were lazy: specifically, the black firefighter candidates were so lazy the Vulcans had to fill their application forms out for them to get them into the fire department.

“Oh, okay, so you’re saying you got all this because of your hard work, right?” Washington would reply. “Nobody ever reminded you to follow through on an opportunity? Your firefighter daddy or your uncle never filled out a piece of paperwork for you and carried it down to headquarters to hand in because you were busy that day?” Washington knew how the system worked, because that’s what his firefighter dad had done for him. He was at Cheyney University in Pennsylvania studying geology when he came back to take his FDNY test. When he graduated with honors he headed out to the West Coast to work, including a stint in Alaska as an air traffic controller. His dad forwarded all the FDNY packets requiring signatures to him and reminded him of all the deadlines to submit his documentation.

But no matter how much Washington debated the other firefighters, they’d be right back in the kitchen the next day, flogging the same point. It didn’t matter to Washington how many times they went down that endless road; he was more than happy to argue back.

It wasn’t until 1992 that Washington got settled in Engine 234 in Crown Heights. His attempts to switch into a fast-paced firehouse had all failed until that year, when Bill Green, a black lieutenant, filed a suit against the FDNY, charging that he was being kept out of an elite rescue unit while whites with less experience got in. Once Green filed his claim, the FDNY cleared its backlog of black transfer requests, including Washington and firefighter Kirk Coy, who wanted out of the increasingly sleepy East Village and into action-packed Harlem. By a lucky stroke of fate, Washington’s cousin Gary was also assigned to Engine 234. Not only were there many more fires, adding to the excitement and connection shared by all the firefighters, there were about four other blacks in the house. As was common in the FDNY, the firehouse was shared by two companies, known as a double house. Each company was assigned to specific tasks. Washington’s engine company manned the rig that carried hoses and got water on the flames. The other half of the house was for the ladder company, whose chief job at a fire was to gain entry, vent the building to suck out the heat and smoke, and search for victims. Engine 234 also housed a battalion, which meant a battalion chief and an aide were stationed there, along with a bright red suburban that was used to ferry the top officer to and from emergencies. All told there were about 60 firefighters—all men—six lieutenants, two captains and four chiefs. There were none of the knock-down, drag-out verbal fights that had erupted in his past firehouses, in part because there were more blacks present and also because few of the white firefighters there had an appetite for that type of discussion. And beyond that, an officer who worked frequently with Washington, Lieutenant Bobby Boldi, didn’t tolerate that type of infighting.

The captain of Engine 234 had sent Washington to chauffeur school so he could learn how to operate the company’s big red rig. The young firefighter didn’t mind filling in sometimes as company chauffeur, but he particularly enjoyed it when he got to work alongside Lieutenant Boldi. The two sat side by side as Washington roved the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, with its unique mix of Caribbean, African American and Orthodox Jewish residents. Washington hadn’t been stationed there when the Crown Heights riots popped off, three days in August 1991 of blacks and Orthodox Jews raging against each other. The violence started when a child of Guyanese immigrants was accidentally struck and killed by an automobile in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of a Jewish religious sect. The accident was like a powder keg to long-standing animosities and turf wars, and the riots played a major role in the 1993 mayoral elections. Dinkins was heavily criticized for an ineffectual police response.

In the chunks of time Boldi and Washington spent in the truck’s front cab, while Engine 234’s crew performed building inspections or checked out minor complaints, the two talked about anything and everything. In Boldi, who stood only about five feet eight but was built like a powerhouse, Washington discovered a rare kind of empathy, one that saw beyond color both inside and outside the firehouse. It wasn’t a characteristic he’d found among his other white colleagues. The stocky, upbeat lieutenant, who always had a smile on his face and greeted everyone with respectful courtesy, almost never lost his temper. But when he did, the target of his ire was reduced to a quaking mess. Washington never witnessed Boldi exploding, but he heard tales from others. Boldi didn’t gloss over the challenges that black firefighters faced. The unlikely pair sometimes even met up in the firehouse to chat in Boldi’s office, talking frankly about race relations in the city, the obstacles for blacks to get on the job, the many ways in which they could feel isolated and alone even in the midst of a firehouse crowded with colleagues. There were one or two firefighters Washington liked in Engine 234, guys that he sometimes cracked jokes and talked sports with. But he didn’t open up about race with anybody but Boldi, who was one of the few who seemed to get that people could be more than their circumstances. In their quiet moments together, the two men reached an affinity that created a firehouse bond Washington didn’t have—and never expected—with other white firefighters.

Once, when Washington was detailed for a day to a nearby firehouse, he got into a brutal fight with a firefighter who had a reputation as a troublemaker. From the minute he walked in the door Washington recognized it was going to be a long shift. He’d encountered that particular smoke eater before, and they’d never mixed well. The man was huge, angry, and always eager to vent on someone. He enjoyed picking fights, and, like most firefighters, Washington found avoiding him the easiest way to deal with him. After a few hours on the temporary detail, when there was a break between runs, Washington went upstairs and stretched out on a bunk. He wasn’t aware how much time had passed when suddenly the door flew open and the firefighter stood there, screaming his name.

“Where the fuck have you been? We’re looking for you, asshole. There’s a phone call for you and we’re calling your name over the speaker and you’re up here taking a fucking nap,” the firefighter yelled. “I oughta kick your ass.”

Washington leaped up from the bed.

“Yeah, go ahead. You think you’re a bad man, go ahead and do it,” he sneered back. That was all he got out before the hulking firefighter—who easily weighed over 230 pounds and had three inches on Washington—lunged forward. He wrapped his hands around Washington’s neck, trying to choke the younger man. Washington twisted away, then spun the firefighter around and shoved his attacker backward on the bed. When he fell, Washington pounced. But even sitting on the firefighter’s chest, it took every ounce of strength he had to keep the bigger man pinned. They grappled without saying a word, breathing heavily, as Washington struggled to hit him hard in the face. The firefighter beneath him dodged and blocked his punches with his beefy forearms. When the firefighter succeeded in shoving Washington from his chest, they jumped off the bed, still wrestling furiously. Everything happened in less than a minute, but they were both exhausted, trembling from the intensity of the fight. When the fire alarm went off, signaling a run, they stood glaring, gulping for air. As the bells continued to sound, the firefighter turned and walked away. Washington followed him down the stairs, still trying to catch his breath. A few seconds later Washington was on the truck, zooming away to respond to a fire. The other man, instead of going on the call, was relieved from his shift and went home.

By the time Washington got back to his own firehouse, word had already arrived. Gossip inside the FDNY ran faster than most flames, creating the often repeated joke, “Telegraph, telephone, tell-a-firefighter.” Washington waved away the eager chatter. He didn’t feel like rehashing the whole thing. The guy wasn’t worth the hassle.

A few weeks later, Washington learned the troublemaker had been removed, transferred out of the house. It should have fallen to the officers of the firefighter’s company to mete out that punishment, but none of them bothered with any disciplinary action. The transfer request came from Lieutenant Boldi, who quietly made some phone calls and put a firm word in a few ears. He never brought it up to Washington, and it wasn’t something they had to discuss. Once, during one of their wandering chats, Boldi in his blunt way summed up the basic reality of Washington’s everyday firehouse life.

“Paul, these guys ain’t ever gonna like you. You’re just too proud of being black,” the lieutenant said. Washington laughed, recognizing his mother’s attitude in the truth of Boldi’s words. Around 1995, Boldi was promoted to captain. Not long after, he was diagnosed with cancer. The sickness ate his formerly hearty frame down to a husk but—as Washington learned during his hospital visits—didn’t diminish his spirit. During one of their talks, Boldi surprised Washington with a gift.

“Here, I want you to have these,” Boldi said, stretching out his hand. The young firefighter saw two slim pieces of silver lying in Boldi’s palm—his lieutenant’s bars. Boldi knew that Washington had taken the lieutenant’s exam and his promotion was imminent. The inheritance was an old fire department tradition, one set of bars handed down from an officer to another as a special token. Washington was touched and proud that Boldi wanted to share it with him. When he made lieutenant, Boldi’s bars were the ones pinned to his collar to designate his new rank. His former boss lived just long enough to see it.

In Washington’s experience, there were very few white men like Boldi in the fire department, or elsewhere. But he never had a problem looking young black recruits in the eye and promising that if they took the job, they’d never regret it. Some of them were bound to have some bad luck and get stuck in a firehouse with a less-than-stellar company. But the Vulcans would be there to help them find a way out. “You won’t ever have to worry about going through this stuff alone,” Washington would say, and it was 100 percent the truth. The organization had been forged out of the virulent racism of the Jim Crow era, when the few blacks who were brave enough to try out for the job endured terrible treatment. Wesley Williams founded the Vulcans with the hope that no other black firefighter would ever feel as isolated and vulnerable in a firehouse as he did his first few years.