Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.

Supreme and Chanel have been scolded about their lack of financial discipline in countless meetings with city agencies. But when that money arrives, they do not think about abstractions like “personal responsibility” and “self-reliance.” They lose themselves in the delirium that a round of ice creams brings. They feel the sudden, exquisite rush born of wearing gold teeth again—of appearing like a person who has, rather than a person who lacks.

“If I don’t pull through, who’s gonna pull through?”

She has never seen activism amount to anything. Her people always wind up with a bad deal. Why should this end differently? She puts the sign down.

“If you keep the area dim, you can keep the minds of the people dim,” she says.

It is a less-known fact that Brooklyn was built on the backs of slaves, brought here by the Dutch in 1626 to clear land, build roads, and work the tobacco plantations. When the British took the colony nearly four decades later, renaming it for the Duke of York, the importation of slaves began in earnest. The colony’s enslaved population swelled to 13,500, making it the largest slaveholding territory in the North. And nowhere in New York was the concentration of slaves higher than in Brooklyn—one-third of the population.

“They built these projects on top of all this death,”

Fort Greene’s two economies are an experiment born of gentrification—a term derived from the gentry, which means “people of high social status, nobility.” To say that an area has been “gentrified” is to invoke the racially coded language of an “urban” neighborhood where muggings are down and espresso beans are roasted—a place that has been “discovered,” as though no one had been living there.

The teacher’s voice is a balm, like other routine comforts—the heat, for example—that get noticed only in absentia.

High Line.

Entitlement is born of self-worth. Some kids have it naturally. Others must develop it against the proof of their experience.

Never mind that McKinney’s students are unlikely to meet the mayor. They should not be robbed of the belief that they could, that the world belongs to them and not the other way around. Miss Hester wants them to learn this, just as she did. The more they see, the farther they will reach. She is already planning a visit to the White House.

Since Bloomberg took office, the number of homeless families has risen by 80 percent. They are now staying in shelters for the longest period on record. When asked about this in August 2012, Bloomberg replied that the city’s shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

Over the last decade, city and state inspectors have cited the Auburn shelter for more than four hundred violations, among them broken elevators, nonfunctioning bathrooms, faulty fire alarms, insufficient heat, spoiled food, sexual misconduct by staff, inadequate childcare, and the presence of mice, roaches, mold, bedbugs, lead, and asbestos. In interviews, the mayor’s staff told me that Auburn’s aging infrastructure was mostly to blame, and that the city had spent nearly $10 million on repairs and renovations at the shelter. They declined to comment on the reports of sexual abuse.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load Or does it explode?

“You want something that will bring you something, not take from you.”

Fronts are liabilities. Now she wants assets.

“You gotta keep your hood credit up,” Chanel tells her daughter. “You take the biggest, baddest one down first and the rest of ’em will back up off of you. That’s just how it works.”

It is Dasani’s belief that she and her siblings are the cause of her mother’s ruin. It never occurs to her that for Chanel, the children represent her only accomplishment.

Of the 255 playgrounds Moses built in New York City in the 1930s, only two were in Black neighborhoods.

For Black veterans like June, a different life awaited. They were largely denied the GI Bill supports that lifted their white comrades into the middle class. Job training programs catered overwhelmingly to whites, as did universities and financial institutions. There was little that a scholarship or a mortgage could do for an African American veteran when colleges and banks turned down his applications. The GI Bill, like the military, answered to a Jim Crow South.

Out of nearly 71,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill in New York and northeastern New Jersey in 1950, less than 1 percent went to nonwhite veterans. Yet home ownership was key to accruing wealth. White American families would eventually amass a median net worth nearly ten times that of Black families. Put another way, the exclusion of African Americans from real estate—not to mention college, white-collar jobs, and the ability to vote—laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.

“A riot,” in King’s words, “is the language of the unheard.”

The exodus of stable, norm-setting Black families, combined with the chronic joblessness left in their wake, led to social isolation and what Wilson called “maladaptive behaviors.” Teenage pregnancy, single-mother households, welfare dependency, drug trafficking, and violent crime had reached striking new heights by the mid-1970s. While his critics challenged the concept of ghetto “culture,” Wilson (who is African American) wrote that “culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities.”

While his critics challenged the concept of ghetto “culture,” Wilson (who is African American) wrote that “culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities.”

Crack was the poor man’s cocaine—smoked rather than snorted, at a fraction of the cost. It came in the form of a crystal rock, made by dissolving powder cocaine in hot water with baking soda. The rock was then heated through a pipe and inhaled. Crack had surfaced in America by the early 1980s, first in Miami and Los Angeles before spreading to New York. Unlike its pricier cousin, powder cocaine, crack brought an instant high. While coke remained a glamour drug, selling for $100 per gram, crack wound its way through the ghetto at $3 a rock.

The drug’s immediate, euphoric high and very low cost combined to devastating effect. Crack brought a surge of dopamine, a neurotransmitter connected to the brain’s reward system. The high ended within twenty minutes, followed by a crash that left users craving more. In time, Margo needed the drug just to feel normal.

In 1986—the same year that Chanel discovered her mother’s crack pipe—Congress approved a new law making punishment for crack possession (common among the poor) one hundred times more harsh than for powder cocaine (common among the wealthy). Even first-time crack offenders landed mandatory minimum sentences of five to ten years, contributing to the explosion of America’s prison population—a disproportionately Black and Latino group that came to include Chanel’s two brothers, an uncle, and four cousins. Within a decade, this population would surpass a million. The United States had claimed the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Even first-time crack offenders landed mandatory minimum sentences of five to ten years, contributing to the explosion of America’s prison population—a disproportionately Black and Latino group that came to include Chanel’s two brothers, an uncle, and four cousins. Within a decade, this population would surpass a million. The United States had claimed the highest incarceration rate in the world.

By now, nine-year-old Chanel was spending her weekends with Joanie and the rest of her time with Sherry, who had never taken a drug or even a sip of alcohol. “It was like two different people trying to raise the same kid,” Chanel says.

Chanel’s weeks with Sherry left her wistful. Her weekends with Joanie left her hungry. Neither mother could meet every need. For Chanel, something was always missing, like a car without a steering wheel or a kitchen without a sink.

She learned to adapt, staying quiet when terrible things happened. It was at Sherry’s house that Chanel experienced her greatest trauma. She was still in elementary school when a male cousin lured ...

Starting in the mid-1970s, New York’s streets filled with a new kind of vagabond—the so-called “bums,” “panhandlers,” and “shopping bag ladies” (known as SBLs among aides to Mayor Ed Koch). A third of this population, by some estimates, had been released from state mental institutions with nowhere to go. The city’s cheapest housing, its notorious Single Room Occupancy hotels, were closing to make way for luxury buildings.

Robert Callahan, an Irish cook who had lost his job, becoming an alcoholic. In his name, advocates for the homeless filed a class-action lawsuit that established New York’s constitutional right to shelter. In 1980, a year before the landmark court order went into effect, Callahan died on the streets of the Lower East Side.

To own a house remained the symbol of American triumph. The ultimate loss, then, was to be “homeless,” a word that entered popular discourse in the 1980s. One population was disproportionately hit: African Americans. The musician Tracy Chapman alluded to this in her 1988 hit song, “Fast Car,” singing “We’ll move out of the shelter.”

Hotel Allerton, the infamous Chelsea flophouse where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe had stayed in 1969, surrounded by half-naked junkies and wallpaper, Smith later wrote, that was “peeling like dead skin in summer.”

Joe was now in love with Margo’s oldest daughter, Sherelle. To support their baby son, Joe had dropped out of community college and was dealing crack.

Money was so tight that the following year, in 1994, Chanel agreed to have some teeth pulled. A dentist in East New York was offering a subway token, worth $1.25, for each tooth. Working from a dingy office on Pennsylvania Avenue, he billed Medicaid for this scam. None of that mattered to Chanel, Roach, Margo, or Joanie, all of whom had teeth pulled. Chanel remembers her body thrashing in pain as strangers held her down in the chair. The dental office charged Medicaid $235 for pulling four of Chanel’s teeth. She left with a few subway tokens.

“Brotherly Love Overrides Oppression and Destruction.”

Supreme had tried church, but it left him empty. “You can’t tell me to believe in something and then say I can’t see it, touch it, feel it,” he said. But his own hands he could touch. And God, according to the Five Percent, dwelled within those hands. Knowing this filled him with a sense of power.

One could only “blood out” by dying or converting to “another religion.”

The library was where the “lies are buried.” A television was “telling a lie vision.” Sometimes the two codes worked in tandem. The number 7 meant “God,” which was interchangeable with “Allah,” the meaning of the letter A. This meant that Dasani’s grandmother Joanie was cleaning the Allah train, the train of God.

Wu-Tang was always thumping through Dasani’s home, warning of revolution and apocalypse. Time and again, Dasani went to the Five Percent meetings known as “parliaments,”

It was not obvious, in that blinding moment, that money could be useful only if they knew how to spend it. To think it would bring salvation was like asking a set of keys to drive a car. Money could not erase the past.

Dasani reasons that wealth belongs to “the whites” because “they save their money and don’t spend it on drinking and smoking.”

Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, developers broke ground on nineteen luxury buildings in Fort Greene, all in the span of three years. Within a decade, the neighborhood’s real estate prices had doubled and its portion of white residents had jumped by 80 percent—while an estimated three-quarters of Fort Greene’s Black-owned businesses closed.

Brooklyn was seeing the opposite of white flight—a white landing of sorts. This was coded in the language of class: the arrival of “educated” professionals who were lifting a community of “low-income” renters. Yet the color line persists: The very boundaries of neighborhoods that were once marked in red, excluding Black people from buying homes, now contain some of the hottest real estate.

For the arriviste investor, the projects present a rude visual interruption, an inconvenient thing to walk around, but never through.

Dasani’s schoolmates talk of becoming rap stars or athletes, escaping their world with one good break. She also subscribes to this logic. Her life is defined by extremes. In order to leave extreme poverty, it follows that she must become extremely rich or extremely something. Precisely what, she is unsure. Even to dream is an act of faith.