In the course of working on this book, I have had the wonderful experience of being able to enlist many of the children who grew up in the Bronx as my active partners and researchers as I tell the stories of their later lives. Pineapple and her older sister, Lara, have helped me with a multitude of small corrections, and some very big ones, throughout the stages of this writing. So, too, did Jeremy, who updated me repeatedly on events that he observed first-hand and changes that he saw emerging in the streets around St. Ann’s. Lisette and Miranda have generously assisted me as well. The young man I call Angelo and my godson Benjamin have also helped me greatly in areas that draw upon their own awareness of the dangers they have now escaped but which continue to be present in the lives of those around them.
The woman I call Ariella Patterson has also been unusually meticulous in helping me to check elusive details—time-factors, for example, and physical locations of various events, when I was in doubt. She’s also had no hesitation about leading me to reconsider the thematic emphases of certain portions of the early manuscript and the final version of this book, especially those narratives in which I try to understand the formative distortions that predisposed a number of the young men I’ve described to fall into the patterns that destroyed them.
To all these people, young and old, and others whom I have not named, who trusted me to tell their stories and then became my colleagues in describing the entire context of the world in which they came of age and live today, I owe a debt of gratitude.
I also want to thank two bright and energetic college undergraduates and literary scholars, Jacey Rubinstein and Julia Barnard, who studied this book with eagle eyes, and helped me to reconceive several of its chapters, when they came to Cambridge to work with me as interns. Both of them continued to assist me long after they completed their internships.
Reverend Martha Overall examined all the sections of this book that portray the children with whom she’s remained in contact since the years when they were very young, as well as the sections that describe the details of her own career. I have, as in my other books about the children of the Bronx, been grateful for the absolute integrity and unflinching candor with which she has advised me and for the enduring dedication that she brings to bear in every aspect of her service to the disenfranchised and the poor.
Steven Banks, the Legal Aid attorney to whom I’ve turned repeatedly beginning in the years when families in the homeless shelters were in need of his assistance, has helped me understand the workings of the courts and the legal status of young people in New York when they were arrested, or detained, or awaiting sentence. I’m grateful for the time he took in clarifying aspects of the penal system in which Angelo and others were entangled.
I’m particularly indebted to my publishers at Crown for their kindness and forbearance in waiting all this time for a book I promised to them more than seven years ago. My special thanks to my intuitively sensitive and supportive editor, Vanessa Mobley.
In writing about the inner lives and outward struggles of people who have trusted me for many years out of a sense of faith in my discretion and my loyalty, I have relied upon a gentle and judicious friend who had the rare capacity for guiding me through delicate decisions. Lily Jones came to work with me in Cambridge at the moment when I was about to launch into this book. From conception to completion, she has been not only a remarkable researcher and painstaking editor, the kind of ally every writer prays for. Even more important, as I was working on the stories of those children and adults who underwent the greatest tribulations or suffered most profoundly for the loss of those they loved, Lily has repeatedly uplifted me by her gift for seeing the redemptive aspects of their lives—an affirming quality not unlike the one that drew her to Pineapple.
Young as she is, but wise beyond her years, Lily has been instrumental in the writing of this book and has brought a wealth of blessings to this author from a heart of gold and a soul of selfless generosity. Words cannot express my gratitude.