Project Rebirth (10 page)

Her grandson, Charles, sat beside her, a mere boy but taking it all in with his kind brown eyes. He was playing with the curtains, trying to get a glimpse out the window at the speeding landscape. “You can't move the curtains!” Helen told the boy. “The curtains have to stay drawn.” Blackout rules during the war also applied to trains.

After finishing her last cigarette, Helen picked up the empty pack and began smoothing out the foil from the inside of the box. “What are you doing, Tana?” Charles asked, ever the curious child and also mindful not to call Helen “Grandma” (she claimed that she was too young to be one so shouldn't have to suffer the name).

“Even though we're not on the front lines, boy, we're at war. We got to save these foils for the war effort. Never forget to do your part.”

It was a lesson he would never forget.

The morning of September 11, Charles Cook, now sixty years old, woke up at home in his Harlem apartment. The man known as “C.C.” to his many friends and acquaintances was born and raised in that very same neighborhood. His childhood there was filled with a sense of real community. During the forties and fifties, doors were open to friends up and down the block: “All my friends and I, we intertwined,” he wistfully recalls. “We just went from house to house without worrying about knocking on each other's doors. We just walked in each other's houses because we were all a close-knit family.”

Things had dramatically changed over the years. The neighborhood had suffered decades of blight and devastation brought on by drugs and gang violence. But friendship, community, and good fun were still landmarks of his life uptown.

On a normal day Charles could look forward to meeting up with friends at the park to challenge them to the highly strategic card game known as pinochle. He loved to challenge them to a higherstakes version of the game, “double-deck, cutthroat pinochle,” sometimes into the night and all through the weekend. His early retirement from driving trains for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (due to a herniated disc) meant that anytime was a good time to start another tournament.

He could still remember Tana with a beer in her hand, cursing like a sailor and whipping him at pinochle. As an adult, when Charles would drive Tana back down to visit her cousins in Baltimore, they would team up to whip their southern relatives.

On that fateful morning, however, Charles's life would make a turn far, far from the leisurely pace of the past couple of years. He turned on the television to a local channel soon after waking up. He recalls watching an interview with a “probie,” a rookie firefighter, on his first day out in the Wall Street area. The camera panned to a shot of the World Trade Center. A moment later, a low-flying plane soared across the screen and crashed suddenly into one of the towers. Charles sat, stunned for a moment, his mouth agape, and immediately thought,
That's no accident.

Charles also remembers the static distress calls that could then be heard on television from the firefighters' scanners. “Alert! Alert!” was the summons, and then came the Pavlovian screams of a group of people trained to act without question: “We're coming! We're coming!” yelled the cavalry over the airwaves.

Charles wanted as much information as he could gather, so he turned the radio on as well. A man was actually calling from inside one of the burning buildings, describing the unbearable heat. He was trying to find an exit but kept getting pushed back by flames. The man dropped the phone, but the radio host stayed on the line.

In a few breathless moments, the man came back and said he'd found a woman amid the smoke. The man's tone was much calmer now. He claimed that they were both fine and that they loved their families. Then silence. Not a second later, newscasters on the television reported that a man and a woman had jumped from a window, holding hands.

We're at war,
Charles thought.

“The only time I traveled out of the country was courtesy of the United States Army, 1959 'til about '62,” Charles states proudly. Charles was part of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion. His military occupational specialties were water purification and demolition. During the heightened years of the cold war, he and his fellow soldiers were stationed near Frankfurt as defensive support for West Germany from the communist East.

As part of their training missions, the military engineers perfected several types of bridging techniques, including building floating bridges out of inflatable rubber rafts known as pontoons. Charles is proud of having helped his company break the record for fastest bridging across the Rhine River.

Charles's military service ended without his having seen actual combat. Not that he had wanted to. His grandfather, Tana's husband, had not made it back from war. He was buried in Italy, where he had fallen.

Once home, back in Harlem, Charles went through his belongings. He noticed that some of his clothes had been given away. Most of all he missed the blue and orange sweater Tana had knit for him as a present when he turned fifteen. He didn't bother her about it, though. He already knew nothing lasted forever, with the exception of her generosity, which just went on and on. In fact, Tana let him move in with her then. There was nowhere else Charles felt more welcome.

When the first tower collapsed, Charles stopped watching and started acting. He worried about his daughter, Vicky, an epidemiologist working downtown with the city's department of health. He knew his two younger sons, Charles Jr. and Dwayne, were not near the towers, nor was their mother, Carol, from whom Charles had been separated for many years, but with whom he maintained a good relationship.

His thoughts came back to the firefighters who had been rushing to the scene only to meet their deaths. The people would need help, and help had just died. He thought, in horror, of the victims, his fellow New Yorkers, and suddenly the island of Manhattan shrank in his mind. Harlem was not far north anymore, and all he needed to get to Wall Street was a pair of comfortable shoes. He put on an old pair of pants and rushed down the stairs. There was work to do “down there.”

He made his way down the steps of his building on 147th Street with the sturdiness of someone decades younger. As Charles walked downtown through the familiar neighborhood, there was no time to notice the newly planted trees lining the streets in front of regallooking brownstones. Despite his average build and graying afro, his quickened steps and determined gaze gave a sense of toughness built up from the inside, like the concentric rings inside a tree.

All public transportation was at a standstill, so the subway was not an option. Charles proceeded to make his way down by foot from 147th Street. Just south of Harlem, his journey took him through Central Park, where he saw people scampering in every direction except south. Then a police officer approached him. “Everybody's coming uptown!” exclaimed the officer.

“Yes, I know,” Charles replied. “I'm going downtown.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to work.”

“You are going to work?” the officer asked in disbelief.

To which Charles stated, “Yeah, I'm going to the World Trade Center.”

Before reaching the site, Charles made sure to stop at the bank to get some cash, never one to be caught unprepared. He foresaw needing to buy boots to get through the rubble, but he would have to get them later. He had to get down there as quickly as possible.

The scene where the Twin Towers once stood was chaotic and surreal. He saw haze, papers, an entire universe dismantled. He saw ash, the lost, the broken. Charles knew how odd it was to be reminded of Coney Island, but the street was nothing but gray sand, an ersatz beach. He took in the terror of the men and women running from the rubble. Their tears made tracks on their dust-covered faces.

Charles had arrived in the afternoon, just as firefighters were being evacuated from 7 World Trade Center, another building that had caught fire upon the North Tower's collapse. About twenty minutes after five p.m., Charles was a live witness to this third building's collapse.

The giant cloud of smoke lingered up above the site, its reach stretching gradually along the city and beyond the Hudson River. Charles watched a group of rescue workers at street level do the unimaginable—find life among the death and destruction. The hope of finding any more survivors waned as Charles saw body bag after body bag zipped up.

His attention was then drawn to “the hole,” where pockets formed amid the rubble would hopefully yield stranded victims holding on to life. Charles knew he'd have no use for his claustrophobia. The energy of the numerous volunteers already there gave him the confidence to do his part:
If these guys can do it, I can do it!
And that was how it began for Charles: He picked up a pail of water and made his way into the lion's mouth, down into “the hole.”

Says Vicky of her father, Charles, “9/11 totally transformed him. Prior to that, he had aged physically but was still very much a young man.” Now, with newfound purpose and maturity, she says his focus is on giving to others.

At first, Charles had even hesitated to let his family know that he was volunteering at Ground Zero. “I wasn't gonna tell no one,” he says. “I didn't want nobody worrying about me.” But days into his service in September of 2001, Charles ran into Vicky on the subway. She had been in Queens, comforting a friend who lost her husband in the attacks. Charles had made his way to midtown to clear his mind and his lungs and to buy some disposable cameras for fellow volunteers.

While on the platform, Charles was writing his name on the tag of his jacket when he heard a familiar woman's voice say, “Why are you writing your name on your jacket?”

Once he recognized her, he explained what he had been doing and that there was nothing that would keep him from heading back to that hole.