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Gracie Mansion is something of an oddity. In a city with a 2 percent vacancy rate and a shortage of public housing, the mayoral residence has been sitting uninhabited on eleven pristine acres of the Upper East Side. It has been more than a decade since Bloomberg, unlike other mayors, chose to remain in his townhouse, relegating Gracie Mansion to the status of a museum.
When Mayor Bloomberg tried to ban the sale of large sugary drinks, Dasani calculated what two sodas would cost instead of the supersize cup that, in her family, is typically passed among eight small mouths. Lately, a citywide bus strike has caught Dasani’s attention. She must now walk three of her siblings to school.
I break it into three buckets: our intentions, our record, and our rhetoric. Our intentions were good, our record was better than we got credit for, and our rhetoric was lousy.”
Lately, Bloomberg seems irritated by questions about the crisis, giving answers tinged with sarcasm. New York City, the seventy-two-year-old mayor will soon tell listeners on his Friday radio show, is the only city in America where “you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”
She must walk them to their elementary school because the bus drivers are still on strike. To sweeten the deal, Chanel is paying Dasani $3 per week for as long as the strike lasts. So far, Bloomberg has refused to negotiate with the bus drivers’ union, making this one of the most bitter battles of his leadership.
She needs to research Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle in order to decide “which one you agree with.” But she has no computer. With the library closed, Dasani’s only other option is Auburn’s recreation room, which is crammed with children and overseen by a man they call Mr. Rogers (who is known to surf the Internet for knives and guns). “If I can’t type it, the teacher said write it down really neat—like you never wrote that way before.
On test days, she brings bagels, hard-boiled eggs, and yogurt, beating back her students’ hunger so they perform well enough.
“High scores reflect the parents, not the kids,” Miss Hester says, referring to homes plentiful in food, where studying is not a luxury.
“Dasani feels her life is not what it should be,” the teacher says. “She’s absolutely correct. The part she’s incorrect about is that the rest of us have to pay.”
The next morning, on February 14, Chanel heads through the projects, the cash bulging from her pocket. She cannot think of where to put it. She has no bank account, and Auburn is a den of thieves. For now, she will keep it pressed to her body.
“It’s about assets and liabilities,” Chanel tells me. “You want something that will bring you something, not take from you.”
Candy is a trick. It distracts from all that is missing.
She sometimes wonders if candy is like a drug, bringing a cheap thrill at the cost of long-term damage. Cavities tore through Chanel’s mouth long before she ever smoked crack. Lately the children are complaining of toothaches.
By early March, Supreme learns that the State of New York has seized his tax refund. He owes child support for the two children he had before meeting Chanel. The Tax Refund Offset Program will give Supreme’s tax money either to these mothers or to the state, as repayment for cash assistance previously paid to the two mothers.
Dasani has learned to let disappointments pass in silence. Objecting does nothing to change the facts.
“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.
Dasani seems revved up and distracted. Nothing the principal says is getting through. It is her mother’s permission—not Miss Holmes’s prohibition—that propels Dasani.
Drawing on Southern tradition, June Sykes wanted a large family. He had been raised in a home where everyone helped. More children ensured a family’s survival. His daughter Joanie was the fifth of nine siblings, a tight-knit flock.
Many had never been on a ship. Most were from the rural South, where venturing into unknown territory could end a Black man’s life. The very notion that African Americans were joining the military—training to fight and carrying arms—met resistance. A Black serviceman could be lynched for wearing a uniform in public.
June was still a baby when the local Goldsboro Daily Argus ran an editorial musing that lynchings, and the practice of tarring and feathering African Americans, “breaks the monotony” of Southern life because it “gives people something to talk about.”
By 1870, he was no longer a slave, but a forty-year-old farmer living next door to his former enslaver, Holloway Sykes. That same year, David took part in the first federal census to include Black Americans, identifying himself as David Sykes, married with seven children, among them a boy named Albert—the future grandfather of June Sykes.
Until then, no Black infantry had been allowed into combat in Europe during the Second World War. The military—while fighting Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism abroad—hewed to the Jim Crow laws of white supremacy at home.
“Most of us were looking for jungle since the only perception we had of that continent came from Tarzan movies,” Ivan later wrote. “We were aware, all of us, that our forebears had been brought from here to America forcibly in chains and that because of slavery we remained second-class citizens. Yet, despite that bitter history, we were committed to fight for America against the evil of Nazi Germany.”
For decades to come, the Buffalo Soldiers’ heroics would be taught in Italian grade schools and reenacted by Italian civilians, while going largely ignored in America.
No one in Dasani’s immediate family knew that June Sykes had served in this historic infantry. By the time Dasani heard this from me, her only association with “Buffalo Soldier” had come from a Jamaican reggae song. The lyrics of Bob Marley’s ballad held new meaning. “There was a Buffalo Soldier, in the heart of America,” Dasani sang along, bopping her head. “Fighting on arrival. Fighting for survival.”
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.
Black janitors earned 41 percent less than white mechanics. The gap between these incomes, over the next twenty years of June’s working life, would come to $192,000 of lost earnings in today’s dollars.
Back in 1904, a New York Times editorial had warned that renting or selling property to Black buyers would “depress real estate values.”
As more Black people moved to Bed-Stuy, the city withheld sufficient policing and other services. The neighborhood’s fate was sealed in 1935, when the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation began color-coding American cities, using race as a criterion to identify risky investment areas on the map. African American hubs like Bed-Stuy were marked in red for “hazardous.” If you lived in a redlined zone, it was almost impossible to get a mortgage.
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.
This was the largest of the nation’s so-called “projects,” created with the New Deal purpose of aiding “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
The job lasted eight years, but June’s wages were not enough to support a large family, leading his wife to apply for welfare. This meant that June would have to leave home, he told his boss, because the government denied public aid to families with “a man in the house.”
It was in Manhattan, in 1964, that a white off-duty policeman shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old Black boy, setting off the first major uprising of the civil rights era. Four years later, when an assassin took the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., riots swept through Brooklyn and cities across America, leaving forty-three dead.
Six million Black southerners had resettled in cities north and west, finding low-skill work in the automobile, rubber, and steel industries—the very plants that were now shuttering.
degrees. Left behind in places like Brownsville was a deeply poor Black population that the sociologist William Julius Wilson controversially termed “the underclass.” 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
Joanie had been looking for love. Still a teen, she fell for Samuel Humbert, a smooth-talking construction worker who went by the nickname Sonny Boy. He was twice her age and a playboy—still married to a woman from South Carolina, while in Brooklyn he lived with Sherry, his partner of more than a decade. Joanie became Sonny Boy’s girl on the side.
Sherry was the opposite of Joanie: sober, churchgoing, methodically ambitious. She owned a profitable business, running a daycare center from the basement of her home. She was responsible to the point of prim, or, in Margo’s summation, “snotty.” Raised by southerners, Sherry would be nobody’s girlfriend. She called herself Sonny Boy’s “common-law wife.” Elaborate church hats filled Sherry’s closet, stored in shiny boxes. Each Sunday brought a new look—a
The women made peace after Sonny Boy’s death. But his little girl remained Sherry’s to raise—as the official godmother of Chanel—along with a handful of other children who came to live with Sherry on Lincoln Avenue. They had been abandoned by mothers too young or troubled to parent. “We were all kids of kids,” Chanel said.
crisp. This was the way to succeed, Sherry said, looking like the life you wanted.
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.
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).
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.
All her life, she had imagined the day when her mother would reclaim her. It was like a trick her mind played: Joanie’s arms opening, Chanel crashing in.
This was the dawn of “modern homelessness,” a phenomenon driven by Reagan-era cutbacks, stagnating wages, and the soaring cost of homes. 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.
To Margo’s doorstep Joanie went. Five people were already crammed in the two-bedroom apartment: Margo, her two teenage daughters, her newborn grandson, and the baby’s father, Joe (the boy whose mother used to get high with Joanie and Margo on Tapscott). 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.
By the end of that year, in 1990, more than twenty-two hundred people had been killed, including 75 children—39 of them hit by bullets. It was the bloodiest year in modern New York history, unsurpassed until the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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.
May 9, 2009, barely able to breathe. A lung biopsy showed that Chanel had pulmonary tuberculosis—likely a recurrence of the illness she had contracted as a child, at a homeless shelter in Queens. Here in Staten Island, a doctor gave Chanel the Percocet, saying it would relieve her pain. After three weeks in the hospital, she was discharged with a prescription for OxyContin—120 pills per month. As Chanel got hooked on Oxy, she kept telling herself that a doctor had prescribed it. This was “medicine.” How could it be “unhealthy”?
