In the Bronx, History Repeats Itself With Deadly Force
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Version 0 of 1. To a stranger’s knock, a boy of about 9 opens the door of 1022 Woodycrest Avenue, the Bronx. He listens for a moment, then circles back to summon his mother, Manthia Magassa. The warming fragrance of a stew has drifted from the kitchen, then streams in to the cold doorway. An electronic chirp sounds from the wooden stairwell. The boy watches television. Ms. Magassa appears. Had she heard about the fire in the Bronx? “What?” she replied. “Come inside. It’s too cold to stand here.” She had not yet heard about Thursday’s news, of 12 people dead and others critically injured in an apartment house fire on Prospect Avenue. That was three miles from Woodycrest. Ms. Magassa’s own home, now disguised by its brick facade, its swinging gate at the front steps, its ordinariness among the tidy homes and small apartment houses on Woodycrest, is a landmark to such deaths. On March 8, 2007, 10 people died in a fire at 1022 Woodycrest, nine of them children, all immigrants from Mali in West Africa. Five of the children were from the Magassa family. Time has a way of closing over such events; from the street, there is no physical sign of ruin; the Magassas rebuilt the charred interior. “We came back in 2009,” Ms. Magassa said. From conversations on the sidewalk, it was evident that the skin of communal memory has begun to slough off. Marco Herrera, walking out of the apartment building next door, said he had moved in a few months ago and, sorry, had never heard of the calamity that had occurred on his block. Yuri Gonzales, pushing a stroller across from 1022 Woodycrest, explained that he has only been in the country three years, and no, he knew nothing. Kanisha Carty, wheeling a shopping cart, had been in the neighborhood for two years, but she knew of the terrible event. “Ladies from the P.T.A. at P.S. 73 told me,” she said. Nate Johnson, walking his Jack Russell, Lucky, lived one street over then, and now. He remembered the children playing outside, then seeing the firefighters carrying out their bodies, and later, the three big glass jars that had been set up by neighbors and filled with nearly $10,000 in small bills and coins for the survivors by people walking past. In the foyer of 1022, forgetting was not an option. Ms. Magassa digested the news of the Prospect Avenue deaths. The TV beyond her blared with children’s shows. The electronic chirp from the stairs returned every minute. “Anything God does is good,” she said. “I call Allah my God. I lost five children in the fire. I can do nothing to hold them in this world.” Ms. Magassa is one of the wives of Moussa Magassa; polygamy is legal in Mali. The maternal care of the children is shared among the wives. “That day of the fire in 2007, I have, like, seven. I lost five,” Ms. Magassa said. “My little son got born in 2008. So I have three children now.” Investigators determined that the Woodycrest fire was set off on the ground floor by an overheated electrical cord on a space heater near a bed. A woman grabbed a child and ran upstairs to warn others. She left the door open behind her. That, the investigators believed, let the fire travel up the stairs, as if it were a chimney. The circumstances in Thursday’s blaze on Prospect Avenue were similar: a child in a ground floor apartment was playing with a stove and set off the fire, family members ran out of the apartment, leaving the door open behind them. The chimney effect of the stairs did the rest. Of her escape that night in 2007, Ms. Magassa said, “If it was my time, Allah would have taken me. It can be any time. That was not my time. It is not easy to handle, but you have to handle it.” Her faith had allowed her to carry on, she said. The chirping sounded again. Two boys scampered about the living room, indifferent to the adults’ conversation. What would she tell the people on Prospect Avenue? “They have to accept what happens,” she said. Did that take a long time? Her eyes glistened, and she turned her head away before answering. “I didn’t make it hard on myself,” she said. “Allah make that happen.” She was asked about smoke detectors. The fire report said there had been no batteries in them. “That was so long ago, 10 years,” she said. “I don’t remember.” The chirping sounded again from the staircase, the same one that the flames had shot through. That sound came from a smoke detector, warning that its battery was almost dead. “I didn’t know that,” Ms. Magassa said. “I will call my son to bring batteries now.” |