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

by Andrea Elliott

Her skyline is filled with luxury towers, the beacons of a new Gilded Age. The city’s wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. Among them is Dasani’s birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. Just steps away are two housing projects and, tucked among them, a city-run homeless shelter where the heat is off and the food is spoiled. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out.

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

Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. Dasani keeps forgetting to count the newest child. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. She could even tell the difference between a cry for hunger and a cry for sleep.

Dasani feels her way across the room that she calls “the house”—a 520-square-foot space containing her family and all their possessions. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. Hidden in a box is Dasani’s pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. Taped to the wall is the children’s proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. Every inch of the room is claimed.

the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. Sleek braids fall to one side of Dasani’s face, clipped by yellow bows. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. This is the type of fact that nobody can know. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener.

To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: The donated clothing is top shelf. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans.

If they are seen at all, it is only in glimpses—pulling an overstuffed suitcase in the shadow of a tired parent, passing for a tourist rather than a local without a home.

To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare.

Public housing may represent all kinds of inertia. But to live at Auburn is to admit the ultimate failure—the inability to give your children a roof.

There are three ways to be popular, in Chanel’s estimation. Dress fly. Do good in school. Or fight.

The guiding ethos of the charter movement has been “choice”—the power to choose a school rather than capitulating to a flawed education system and a muscular teachers’ union. Champions of charter schools (which are publicly funded but privately operated) consider them the salvation of poor children, a way to close the achievement gap that many public schools cannot.

Even today, many of Miss Hester’s students don’t expect to live much past age twenty.

When Miss Hester looks around her classroom, she sees young versions of herself. She wants her students to do the same in reverse, to see a future for themselves in her example.

Miss Hester, who speaks with a polish that Dasani finds impressive. The teacher enunciates every consonant, while dropping the occasional “ain’t”—almost like a tip of the hat. This is Miss Hester’s way of saying, If I can talk like you, the reverse is also true.

Whenever a child says, “Please don’t call my mother,” Miss Holmes goes into “radar mode.” She has been at McKinney long enough to know that a student’s transgressions at school might bring a beating at home.

“Your spot is on your bed,” says Dasani. “So when you walk in the door, you put your stuff down, straighten up a little bit, you get a snack from the fridge, and you sit on your bed and do your homework. Or do whatever you gotta do. And you stay on that spot—you don’t get up.”

Dasani is too young to remember the moment, nine years ago, when her mother met Supreme at a homeless shelter in Harlem. Chanel was a recovering crack addict with two little girls—Dasani, then a toddler, and Avianna, still a baby. Supreme was a barber whose first wife had died of heart disease, leaving him with two small children of his own: Khaliq, who had trouble speaking, and Nana, who had trouble seeing.

Chanel did not have her children by accident. She had them by design, planning for this small army of siblings, seeing strength in their bond.

Though Chanel had a doting godmother, she grew up longing to be with her birth mother, “longing to have love.” “That’s why the street became our family,” she says. “I didn’t want the street to become their family too.”

This comes to about $65 a day, which, divided among a family of ten, amounts to $6.50 per person—the cost of a subway trip and a gallon of milk. Still, this is more than many people get. Less than 2 percent of homeless families receive survivors benefits.

They talk of wanting real jobs, but many things get in the way—their criminal records, their periodic relapses, their daily attendance at the drug treatment clinics upon which custody of their children rests.

She has only known her stepfather to be erratic—a loving parent one moment, a tyrant the next. It is never clear which Supreme the family will get. Sometimes he vanishes altogether.

When Dasani sheds her uniform, they assume it’s because she is trying to act tough. In fact, the reverse is true: She is acting tough because she can no longer dress fly.

White people divide into two categories: those who are paid to monitor Dasani’s family, and those who are called to help. Sometimes the same people wear both hats. Rarely does the family trust them.

Dasani and Chanel have no reason to trust me. Eventually, Chanel will confess that if I weren’t a mother, she would never have let me near her children. It also helps that I am not, in her words, “all white” because I am “Latin.”

It goes unremarked that here, in a shelter with a $9 million budget, operated by an agency with more than a hundred times those funds, the plumbing has fallen to an eleven-year-old girl.

She seems sleepy, as if she just rolled out of bed. The truth is that Dasani has been up for hours. By the time other children are just waking, she has finished her chores and is scrambling to walk her siblings to their bus stop.

Unlike the disorder at home—the missed welfare appointments, the piles of unsorted socks—McKinney’s dance studio is a place where time is kept and routines are mapped.

To new acquaintances, she introduces herself by a third name—Makeba—which she took when she left the Bloods to marry a man whose own three names follow the same arc: the “slave name” chosen by his parents (Eric), the “street name” chosen by gangbangers (Rat Face), and the “righteous name” chosen by himself (Godsupreme).

She sees no reason to shed one name for another. They all claim space within her kaleidoscopic self.

Sometimes she will stop dead in her tracks, interrupting a crowded sidewalk to stare at a stranger. A woman’s scrunched-up mouth means she hasn’t had enough sex. A boy’s swagger suggests a home without a father. She has what she calls a “bloodhound nose,” sniffing out phoniness in seconds.

No one is allowed to see her cry. She would rather rage or go quiet, keeping the worst thoughts to herself. She is forever revisiting the facts of her life, trying to imagine it had the choices been different. “I don’t love myself,” she says. “That’s my biggest downfall.”

His welfare benefits have arrived, announced by a recording on his prepaid phone. He sets off to reclaim his gold teeth from the pawnshop, at a 50 percent interest rate.

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.

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,” she says.

January brings relief. This is the start of “tax season,” when everyone Chanel knows rushes to file for their “refund”—the special tax breaks given to low-income families. The largest of these is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which can bring a cash subsidy of thousands of dollars to a family like Dasani’s. Administered by the Internal Revenue Service, this is one of the largest antipoverty programs in the country, helping more than 27 million families.

In order to leave Auburn and rent an apartment, Dasani’s family needs a minimum of $4,800, between the broker’s fee, the security deposit, and the first and last month’s rent (for the median cost of a three-bedroom apartment—about $1,000 in early 2013). This does not include moving costs, furniture, or the task of convincing a landlord that the family will continue to pay rent.

Dasani charts her city in a different way. It is a parallel map, seen only by certain people. Each borough corresponds to a particular code. The Bronx is DHS (the Department of Homeless Services). Queens is HRA (the Human Resources Administration). Brooklyn is ACS (the Administration for Children’s Services). These three agencies form the triumvirate of Dasani’s life.

This stems from a Depression-era amendment to New York’s constitution, declaring that the “aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state.”

as ACS—the weightiest acronym in Dasani’s life. This agency investigates about 55,000 reports of child abuse or neglect every year. In 2012 alone, ACS will remove 4,072 children from their homes, placing them in a foster care system with more than 13,000 children—the vast majority of them Black or Latino. Almost half of New York City’s residents (and a quarter of its children) are white. Nearly all of the city’s foster children are people of color. Don’t become a statistic is something Dasani hears all the time—from the teachers at McKinney to the preachers on the street. There is little that Dasani can do to become, or un-become, the statistics that mark her life.

Chanel carries an electronic benefits card, which works like a debit card. She can use it in most bodegas to buy groceries (but not cigarettes, alcohol, hot food, or diapers, though cashiers often make exceptions).

Chanel refuses to apply for the benefit, as evinced by her records. This may seem contradictory for a woman who routinely steals, but Chanel’s moral compass is mysteriously complex. She believes that “special needs” children internalize the label, accruing a school record that “marks them for life.” As proof, she points to another family at Auburn, whose children get “like four checks, and they all mad slow.” She would rather get out and hustle.

Over the last decade, from May 2004 until January 2013, ACS has conducted sixteen investigations of Dasani’s parents. Six of the allegations were declared “unfounded.” The other ten involved drug use, lack of supervision, or educational neglect.

Prevention is a luxury reserved for schools with multiple counselors.

Proper discipline is a form of control. The unruly child grows up to join a gang or land in prison, which is just someone else’s system of control.

This meant that here, in Brooklyn’s first school for Black children, Community Roots was giving Dasani her most frequent glimpse of white children.

Today, one must dig to uncover the history of Black Fort Greene, whose pioneers seem in danger of being forgotten. Dr. McKinney’s former brownstone at 205 DeKalb Avenue—the site of her thriving medical practice—would be listed for sale in 2016 for nearly $2.7 million, without any mention of its history. Instead, the names of Brooklyn’s slave-holding families dominate the terrain. Boerum Hill (named for Simon Boerum, a man with three slaves). Wyckoff Street (Peter Wyckoff, enslaver of seven). Ditmas Park (four slaves). Luquer Street (thirteen). Van Brunt Street (seven). Cortelyou Road (two).

She is dreading adolescence. Among girls of means—those who don’t have to worry about the cost of tampons—menstruation is a celebrated milestone.

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.