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From time to time, the family relied on food stamps. But they had a fridge and a stove, which helped them plan meals, stretching groceries to the end of the month. In Dasani’s family, food stamps could vanish with a few rounds of store-bought fried chicken.
Sherry’s home, like her health, was falling apart. Homeless service investigators had visited, finding the house overcrowded and unsuitable for the children. But Dasani and her siblings could still visit on weekends.
Just two weeks ago, this girl was challenging students to fight. Miss Hester wonders how long Dasani’s reformation will last. Dasani has her own doubts as well. Fighting makes her feel powerful. It distracts from other feelings—from what she will learn, years from now, to call “being vulnerable.”
By this equation, anger + fighting = triumph = survival.
No adult at McKinney is going to tell Dasani to stop surviving. The trick is to nudge her toward another form of self-preservation: avoiding the fight altogether.
“Like when I want to hurt somebody, like when I want to fight, or when I feel really sad, I just breathe in and out,” she tells me. “It works.”
A less scrappy outfit might avoid such displays, but there is no competition. It is just Yogi Bear. And that’s why Dasani likes them, in the same way she likes Miss Hester and Miss Holmes. Nothing counts like the people who show up.
smoking.” Fort Greene’s demography may feed such perceptions: The top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times the income of the bottom quintile, making this one of the most unequal pockets in the city.
while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?”
In the sibling pecking order, no one questions Dasani’s supremacy. Even she forgets that Khaliq is technically older. He was born four days before her—in the same Brooklyn hospital, back when Chanel and Supreme were strangers. By chance, Supreme’s then wife, Kylia, and his future wife, Chanel, were both giving birth for the first time. They might have passed each other in the hall, in matching maternity gowns.
If each child has a role, seven-year-old Maya is the family diva, six-year-old Hada the bookworm, and Baby Lee-Lee the clown. She is starting to walk. Her legs wobble as she waves her arms, tumbling forward. She gets back up, howling with delight. Strangers melt at the sight of Lee-Lee’s plump cheeks and soft curls.
She is paying close attention, at the request of eleven-year-old Nana. “Remember every single detail,” Nana had asked, as if her life depended on it. Not only was she going blind, which meant that her siblings were becoming her eyes. But she longed to see Washington, D.C.—the city where she was born in 2002, back when Supreme was still married to her mother, Kylia, who died there.
Chanel stops taking Sherry’s calls. This is Chanel’s way of leaving before she is left. She does not want to say goodbye, much less tell the children they are losing their only true home.
She pauses at the wooden door of the bathroom, which reminds Chanel of her father, Sonny Boy. He is there at that door, some flicker of a memory. These are the things one loses with a home.
“If Daddy’s so righteous and notices so many mistakes, how come he doesn’t notice his?” Dasani tells me. “He said he was gonna stop smoking. He promised. But what he do? He still smoking. He told us to change our habits, cuz he said now we’re responsible, so he said, ‘Y’all gotta change your habits.’ So everybody changed they habits, but he didn’t change his.”
Supreme’s mother and father were still teenagers when he was born in August 1977. They lived in an apartment in Crown Heights. His father was schizophrenic, and neither parent worked.
Supreme would visit his grandmother in the nearby projects of East New York. He was five years old when an assailant burst into her home and shot her seven times. She died sitting in a rocking chair.
Chanel complains that she cannot access the children’s trust. But donors have expressed concern to Legal Aid about cash going into the hands of an addict. And even if Chanel’s expenditures were monitored, the money would still count as income, causing the family to lose its food stamps and other public assistance.
A tall man wearing a do-rag stands nearby, talking to himself. “When I get mad, I have to break something,” the man says loudly. Chanel eyes the man with a neutral expression. He belongs to the bottom rung. She is forever drawing a line between herself and them. She would rather go hungry than visit a soup kitchen.
Each trip to a city agency brings a surprise reunion. Sometimes Chanel finds this depressing. The same people seem trapped in the same buildings all their lives. But at least they have one another.
Almost nothing upsets Miss Holmes more than the “baby machine” mother who leaves the task of raising her children to others. The burden usually falls to the oldest girl.
Adults must have “accountability” for their choices, the principal says. “That’s just how I was raised, and that’s how I see it. You wanna have two? You take care of two. You wanna have ten? You take care of ten, okay?
Now she knows better. She reports negligent parents because it is the law—not because she thinks that children are better off in foster care.
For a child to truly thrive, says Holmes, her parents would be more than monitored. They would be given material help to fight housing instability, unemployment, food scarcity, segregated schools, and other afflictions common to the poor. Rarely does this happen.
“Sometimes you just have to turn the channel,” the teacher tells her new students, after seating Avianna and handing her a box of tissues. “Where are we?” “School!” the students reply. Miss Hester lets the word sink in. School. Not home. There is no home for Miss Hester right now. Two months ago, she was evicted by her landlord in Bed-Stuy, who was clearing the building for renovation. It will sell one week from now, on September 11, 2014, for $1.2 million (nearly double its value the previous year).
But Miss Hester also knows that in today’s shelter system, she is no exception. Plenty of working New Yorkers have been uprooted by eviction. The city’s lack of affordable housing is the primary reason that families enter the shelter system.
She is constantly dispensing advice—on how to stay married and, when my marriage ends, on how to stay strong as a single mother. She watches my own crucibles closely, noting that some things cross the lines of race and class.
point. The staff at McKinney already knew that Dasani had landed a two-month “superintendent’s suspension” in Staten Island, after fighting the girls who were bullying Nana. This meant that Dasani would have to report to a “suspension site.” There are thirty-seven such schools in New York City, with around eight thousand students passing through this academic year—the majority of them Black, consigned to a system known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
All her life, she has been hearing about Pennsylvania. This is the place where people go to be free. Her mother did it as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh. Sherry made the pilgrimage in 2013 to live with a sister. Chanel still talks of moving to the Poconos, though no one believes her.
This was still the era of “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” A turning point had come in 1874, with the Manhattan case of nine-year-old Mary Ellen. For years, she had been sadistically beaten by a guardian. A local missionary wanted to help, but there was no government office tasked with preventing child abuse. So the missionary turned to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose founder helped bring Mary Ellen’s case before the state supreme court.
The annual cost of this experience, paid for by the trust, comes to $84,886 per child. By comparison, the tuition at Phillips Exeter Academy is 45 percent less, but does not include things like orthodontia or birthday presents.
The unspoken message is clear. In order to leave poverty, Dasani must also leave her family—at least for a while.
This thumping routine is the pulse of Hershey. Dasani will absorb it by sheer repetition, until she is sleeping properly and eating healthfully and feeling physically safe. Only when such needs are met can she be expected to thrive.
It is hard to know which sight holds more power—a theme park in the eyes of a poor child, or a palatial school in the eyes of a Brooklyn principal.
The school feels safe, even “peaceful,” says Dasani. Everything is more quiet, including her own mind. She is no longer consumed by the usual worries—of Lee-Lee’s bottle or Supreme’s temper. Each part of her day is now decided by other people. This could make a girl feel caged, but for Dasani, it has the opposite effect. She feels free.
To be poor is to be stressed—a condition that all children experience, to some degree.
A child like Dasani can get stuck in “fight or flight” mode, leading to an overproduction of cortisol and a surge in blood sugar. This can make her resistant to insulin, causing diabetes or obesity. It can accelerate atherosclerosis, the heart disease that killed Dasani’s grandmother at age fifty-four. And it can leave lasting “wear and tear” effects on a growing brain.
The school has aligned itself with the work of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist known for pioneering the “growth mindset”—a theory that the brain is malleable; that a person can get smarter with effort, good strategies, and the help of mentors.
If they labor over a math problem, even with frustration, their brains are getting “stronger,” says Dweck. This makes struggle a good thing—not a sign of stupidity but a path to intellect.
The “yet” places them on a continuum where mistakes are embraced rather than shunned. Students are taught about the “growth mindset,” using it as a crutch when they stumble.
Hershey’s lightest kids are “white chocolate.” The brown students are “milk chocolate.” Anyone of a deeper shade is “dark chocolate.” “Caramel” is reserved for Latinos. “I’m basically a Rolo,” Dasani tells me. “It’s a candy that’s milk chocolate with caramel on the inside.”
This exercise is not just about diction; it’s about reversing what the McQuiddys call the “me first” psyche. “It’s an ego problem,”
The McQuiddys find Dasani unpredictable and, in some ways, outspoken. “She makes no excuses about who she is,” says Jason. But it would be a mistake, he says, to confuse this bravado with transparency. “She still has layers that she covers up and keeps hidden.”
But Tabitha is prevailing in one important way. She is getting Dasani to talk. And the more she talks, the clearer it all becomes. Dasani had been feeling out of control, so she reclaimed control. Her hair belongs to her alone—not to her mother nor to the McQuiddys nor to any salon.
Like most children, Dasani brings to therapy a psychological barrier—a wall that Julie must try to break through. WHAT’S YOUR WALL? reads a sign near Julie’s desk. SILENCE? LAUGHTER? JOKES? SMALL VOICE? MEAN WORDS?
Dasani hates it when people say that “actions speak louder,” as if words were not an action. It is usually a person’s words, in Dasani’s experience, that cause a fight. Almost nothing has the power of language.
She dreamed of going to college and competing in track. By her senior year, she had made it into Spelman College, the prestigious historically Black school in Atlanta, Georgia. Even if she could have afforded the tuition, Julie had another impediment: She was pregnant.
While resilience is celebrated in children, it can complicate therapy. In order to survive, Dasani has learned to suppress her feelings, downplaying traumatic events. Her psychological “wall” presents itself in the mode of “I’m fine.” She says this often, whether she is talking about herself, or her family, or the hardship they have suffered.
But being a star is work. Sometimes Dasani wants to recede from view, slipping into a quiet space. “Built a fort & a snow castle,” she writes in a journal entry.
She still wonders about her biological father, Ramel. She has heard that he is sober and working at a shoe store. He briefly resurfaced in 2013, taking Dasani and Avianna to his apartment in New Jersey, where he lives with his girlfriend and their baby. The visit stirred up old feelings, and then he vanished again.
