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

by Andrea Elliott

For these are all our children. We will all profit from, or pay for, what they become. —James Baldwin

author’s note This is a work of nonfiction. No facts have been altered and no names have been changed. Ten of the children are identified by their nicknames, and several of the adults by their street names. I witnessed most of the scenes I describe in this book. My reporting also draws from thousands of records, hundreds of interviews, and many hours of video and audio recordings.

His daughter was too little to understand what was happening—that the people in the van were child protection workers. That the court had ordered them to take Lee-Lee and her siblings away. That the parents were being accused of “neglect.” That they had neglected, among other things, the condition of their home. A moment passed. The van door opened. A caseworker stepped onto the sidewalk and paused. The father gathered Lee-Lee up and placed her in the van, promising to come for her tomorrow. That evening, the siblings were transferred to a facility in Lower Manhattan, formerly the site of the Bellevue Hospital morgue. They stepped through a metal detector, trading their street clothes for matching maroon jumpsuits. Their father’s words kept ringing. Whatever happens, stay together. This much they had tried, for all of their short lives. Eight children, sixteen hands clasped into one chain. Like this they had dashed across the highway or played Ring Around the Rosie, lifting up and crashing down while never letting go. They had learned this from their parents, who had learned it from their parents. Now the chain was breaking. The strongest link was already gone. Her name was Dasani.

She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes—the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. Mice scurry across the floor. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mold from a rusted pipe. A few feet away is the yellow mop bucket they use as a toilet, and the mattress where the mother and father sleep clutched. Radiating out from them in all directions are the eight children they share: two boys and five girls whose beds zigzag around the baby, her crib warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.

“It makes me feel like there’s something going on out there,” she says. “I have a lot of possibility. I do, though. I have a lot of things to say.” One of the first things Dasani will say is that she was running before she walked. She loves being first—the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honor roll. She is a child of New York City. Even Dasani’s name speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. Who paid for water in a bottle? Just the sound of it—Dasani—conjured another life. It signaled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. By the time Dasani came into the world, on May 26, 2001, the old Brooklyn was vanishing. Entire neighborhoods would be remade, their families displaced, their businesses shuttered, their histories erased by a gentrification so vast and meteoric that no brand of bottled water could have signaled it. And as prosperity rose for one group of people, poverty deepened for another, leaving Dasani to grow up—true to her name—in a novel kind of place. 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, Brookl...

She counts her siblings in pairs, just like her mother said. The thumb-suckers first: six-year-old Hada and seven-year-old Maya, who share a small mattress. The ten-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and eleven-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. She will kick them awake. She will tell them to shut up. They will drop to the floor in silence. 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. Lee-Lee’s cry was something else. Only a mother could answer it and their mother was gone. Nearly a year ago, the city’s child protection agency had separated thirty-four-year-old Chanel Sykes from her children after she got addicted to opioids. Her husband also had a drug history. But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment program. Now Chanel is back, her custodial rights restored. Still, the baby howls.

Now the bottle must be heated. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Over the next year, 911 dispatchers will take some 350 calls from Auburn, logging twenty-four reports of assault, four reports of child abuse, and one report of rape.

Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. If she cries, others answer. Her body is still small enough to warm with a hair dryer. She is the least of Dasani’s worries. “I have a lot on my plate,” she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. “I got a fork and a spoon. I got rice, chicken, macaroni.” The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni her siblings—except for Baby Lee-Lee, who is a plump chicken breast. “So that’s a lot on my plate—with some cornbread. That’s a lot on my plate.”

Dasani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. Here in the neighborhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the “shelter boogies.” Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasani’s secret. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day—the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. She hopes to slip by them all unseen.

She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. 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. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the baby’s creaky stroller.

She likes being small because “I can slip through things.” She imagines herself with supergirl powers. She would blink and turn invisible. Sometimes she doesn’t have to blink. In the blur of the city’s streets, Dasani is just another face. Strangers do not see the opioid addiction that chases her mother, or the prisons that swallowed her uncles, or the cousins who have died from gang shootings and AIDS.

Children are not the face of New York’s homeless. They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets, and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. 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.

There is no separating Dasani’s childhood from that of her matriarchs: her grandmother Joanie and her mother, Chanel. Their fleeting triumphs and deepest sorrows are, in Dasani’s words, “my heart.” The ground beneath her feet once belonged to them. Her city is paved over theirs. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named for a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. Back then, from the ghetto’s isolated corners, a perfume ad was the portal to a better place. Today, Dasani lives surrounded by wealth, whether she is peering into the boho chic shops near her shelter or surfing the Internet on Auburn’s shared computer. She sees out to a world that rarely sees her.

To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is to follow her seven siblings. Whether they are riding the bus, switching trains, climbing steps, or jumping puddles, they always move as one. Only together have they learned to navigate poverty’s systems—ones with names suggesting help. Child protection. Public assistance. Criminal justice. Homeless services. To watch these systems play out in Dasani’s life is to glimpse their power, their flaws, and the threat they pose to Dasani’s own system of survival. Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation, her greatest fear. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control—hunger, violence, racism, homelessness, parental drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. As Dasani grows up, she must contend with them all.

When Dasani hears “shelter boogie,” all she can think to say is what her mother always says: that Auburn is a “pit stop.” She is just passing through, whereas the projects are forever. Dasani says this out loud while walking by the Walt Whitman Houses: “You will live in the projects forever, as will your kids’ kids, and your kids’ kids’ kids.” Dasani knows that the battle is asymmetrical. People stay in the projects for the same reason that a quarter million New Yorkers are currently on the public housing waitlist: the rent, for low-income families, is heavily subsidized. Dasani’s parents have been on the waitlist six times. Even if they were lucky enough to land in the projects surrounding Auburn—Whitman or Ingersoll, where Dasani’s grandmother grew up—they would still need to make the rent every month. 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 is no recovering from “shelter boogie.” The most Dasani can do is duck the label.

McKinney’s roots run deep. Like Dasani’s grandmother Joanie, who attended McKinney in the 1960s, most of the middle school students are Black, live in the projects, and are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals. They eat in shifts in the school’s basement cafeteria, watched over by the avuncular Frank Heyward, who blasts oldies from a boom box, telling students, “I got shoes older than you.” For all of McKinney’s pluck, its burdens are great. In the last six years, the city has cut the school’s budget by a quarter as student enrollment continues to drop. After-school resources have shrunk, but not the needs of the students, for whom gun violence, domestic abuse, and murder are common enough that teachers have pushed for an on-site grief counselor.

McKinney is bracing for battle, with flyers warning of “apartheid” and a white “invasion.” Half a century earlier, when Dasani’s grandmother attended McKinney, the very notion of whites “invading” would have sounded extraterrestrial. The opposite was happening. Whites were fleeing. New York City’s school system—now the largest in the nation—is also among the most segregated. One percent of McKinney’s students are white. It is also true that the vast majority of Success Academy’s students (seven thousand are enrolled in fourteen schools) are Black or Latino and from low-income families. But they possess an advantage over Dasani: They win their spot by lottery, which requires the help of an adult—one with a reliable email account or at least a cellphone that doesn’t shut off. None of these conditions exist for Dasani. What she knows is the other side.

Even today, many of Miss Hester’s students don’t expect to live much past age twenty. Two of her former students have been killed. One of them was a boy named Angel, who used to visit McKinney every summer to help Miss Hester set up the classroom for her incoming class. Lately, Miss Hester has been trying a risky exercise: She asks her students to write their own obituary. When given the option of choosing their lifespan, most of them aim for seventy. Then they must imagine all the things they would have accomplished. “I want them to see that they are the authors of their lives,” she says. Miss Hester’s own salvation came at church and in school. She was one of the first Black students to be bused, in 1977, from the projects to a predominantly white school in Brooklyn. A group of local boys ran after her yelling, “Get out of our neighborhood!” She graduated from high school early, bound for SUNY Cortland. And now, thirty-one years (and two master’s degrees) later, Miss Hester has returned to her birthplace, just a short drive from McKinney. Nothing else feels like home. 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.

Teachers are the happiest adults that Dasani knows. When asked “What will you be when you grow up?” she and her siblings all say the same thing: “A teacher.”

“Please don’t call my mother,” Dasani whispers. Miss Holmes is seated in a rolling pleather chair held together by duct tape. She takes a hard look at Dasani. 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.

Finding a way to do homework is the hardest assignment of all. With no desk or chair—just a maze of mattresses—the children study crouched on sheets stamped PROP. OF THE DEPT. OF HOMELESS SERVICES. “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.” When the lights are off, Room 449 assumes a gray aura. Sometimes the children hear noises. Five-year-old Papa thinks he saw a ghost. None of the siblings will venture into the bathroom after dark. This is why they relieve themselves in what Dasani calls “the piss bucket.” Privacy is a luxury. Dasani carves out small, sacred spaces: an upturned crate by the window, a portion of the floor at mealtime, a stall in the scary bathroom. She sits here alone, the toilet lid closed beneath her. Sometimes she reads, or just closes her eyes. Her mind feels crowded elsewhere.

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. These two single parents and their four children merged. After getting married, Chanel and Supreme had another four children, bringing their collective brood to eight. The sheer size of their family can make strangers stare in judgment. Chanel imagines their thoughts: She is a “welfare mom,” having children to profit from the system. She is careless with her body, hopping from man to man without contraception. She is financially reckless, producing more mouths than she can feed. To each of these judgments, Chanel has an answer. She’d like to meet the mother who endures childbirth, six times over, for some extra food stamps “that barely last the month.” She is nobody’s “baby mama.” She is—unlike many women of higher stature and lighter skin—a stubbornly devoted wife, faithful to one man, with whom she is raising one family. 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. “This is a cruel world,” she tells me. “I didn’t want them to be hurt from the world. I wanted them to rely on each other. So they don’t need to depend on people who aren’t family—people on the street who call them ‘sister’ and ...

Depending on the audience, Dasani’s parents are either “working the system” or “making ends meet.” Either way, they are living in a city where no poor family with eight children, supported by parents lacking college degrees, could easily get by. New York, it often strikes Chanel, has no place for the poor. Her family survives because they live rent-free, in a shelter, and have access to three meals a day. “How can I pull up any straps with no boots?” she says.

Dasani feels an anger toward Supreme that she cannot yet speak. She stares at him hard, her stomach knotting up. 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.

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. They figure in Dasani’s life because of the work they do. And on the afternoon of October 4, 2012, this small circle expands to include me, a staff writer at The New York Times.

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.” My ethnicity delights Dasani, whose biological father is half Dominican. But to Chanel, race matters more. I am, at best, a white Latina with a graduate degree, making me the beneficiary of a privilege that she will observe and dissect for years to come.

Lately, it is the family sink that Auburn fails to fix. All night long, it drips and drips, keeping Dasani awake. She knows that her mother has pleaded with the staff to repair it. Finally, Dasani gets fed up. She crouches down to examine the pipe. “Nobody thought about pushing it in and twisting it,” she says. A few quick jerks and she triumphs. Her siblings squeal. 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.

The teacher still does not know where Dasani lives, or how hungry she gets. She comes in late most mornings, never saying why. 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. This would alarm any teacher, prompting a call home or possibly to the authorities. So Dasani keeps it to herself. Every morning, she slips into class quietly, tucking her coat and backpack into the closet, a precious ritual for a girl with no other closet. Her sixth-grade homeroom, true to its name, is becoming a substitute home—a cozy haven of book-lined shelves and inspirational phrases scrawled in chalk. Dasani likes to recite them out loud. “Success does not come without sacrifice and struggle,” she reads, after settling into her desk. Miss Hester can see that Dasani lacks proper clothes and snacks, even basic school supplies. Yet she is keeping up in class, performing well enough to mask her troubles. She possesses, to Miss Hester’s mind, an “intuitive” approach to learning, the kind that comes when rare smarts mix with extreme circumstances.

Dance, she is starting to see, is more than spontaneity. It is a craft of discipline, a way of organizing the mind and body. 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.

Dasani often starts a sentence with “Mommy say” before reciting, verbatim, some new bit of learned wisdom, such as “peppermint tea cures a bad stomach” or “that lady is a dope fiend.” She rarely wavers, or hints at doubt, even as her life is consumed by it. She never talks about the biological father who vanished after she was born. The only person she calls Daddy is the one she can see: her thirty-five-year-old stepfather, Supreme, who has been around since she was two.

Everyone knows Dasani’s mother. Chanel weighs 215 pounds and her face is a constellation of freckles lit by a gap-toothed smile. The street is her domain. When she walks, people often step to the side—in deference to her ample frame or her imperious air. She has three names, each one taken from a different chapter of life. The old folks use her birth name, Chanel. By the time she was running the streets, she went by “Lady Red,” owing to the copper-hued hair she got from her mother, who got it from her father—an inheritance Chanel traces to the white enslavers of her ancestors. On her right arm is the tattoo LADY RED, from her time running a crack house for the Bloods. 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). Supreme gives his wife the vaunted titles of “Earth” and “Queen.” Yet “Chanel” is the word that comes first to her tongue. She sees no reason to shed one name for another. They all claim space within her kaleidoscopic self. When she is feeling up, she wraps her hair in a tubular scarf, in homage to her African roots. When she is down, she hides beneath a wool hat, the kind she hawks on the streets of Brooklyn. She cannot be bothered with the trappings of femininity, things like hair weaves or ...

“I want someone else’s life,” Chanel says. “That’s why I always be watchin’.” She can spend hours analyzing her interaction with anyone white—how the social worker’s voice tightened, suggesting a hidden disdain; how the man in a suit brushed past her on the train, as if his body mattered more. A person’s face is a map. Those who look to the left are lying. Those who smile too much are wearing “a frown turned upside down.” Chanel engages in endless wordplay, reciting lyrics, composing raps. An internal soundtrack accompanies her life. She switches from song to song like the dial on a radio—a bit of Luther Vandross, a smattering of Rihanna. She will hum a tender tune like “Mercy, Mercy Me,” only to stop before it gets the best of her. 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.”

Ten-year-old Avianna smiles and waves. Her uncle sees the child but keeps driving. She waves again as the car pulls off. He lives in the projects across from Auburn and works for the city’s Parks Department. The children have never set foot in his apartment. “Family sucks,” Chanel says.

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.

Miss Holmes has seen plenty of distressed children, but few have both the depth of Dasani’s troubles and the height of her promise. There is not much Miss Holmes can do about life outside school. She knows this is a child who needs exposure, who “needs to see The Nutcracker,” who needs her own computer. There are many such children.

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.

Her right knee is swelling and she is in a foul mood. Christmas is just weeks away. She must produce eight gifts, one per child, requiring a hustle that falls on the wrong side of the month, when the family’s cash has run dry.

“You know what this is?” she says, waving a hand at the park. “This used to be an old war zone.” Chanel’s mother, Joanie, had told her the story. Fort Greene, as the name suggests, was once a fort in the Revolutionary War. This was hallowed ground—the site of America’s first major battle, in 1776, after declaring independence from the British crown. There is nothing to announce this in Fort Greene’s topography, aside from an aging plaque under a 149-foot tower. History fades quickly, with only the most obvious facts, like the tip of that tower, standing out. Singular narratives take hold, casting the North as the symbol of abolition and freedom and the South as the land of the enslaved. 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. Thousands of enslaved Blacks took up arms in the Revolutionary War—some for the British, who promised them freedom, and some for the rebels (after George Washington reluctantly allowed them to fight). The biggest battle unfolded in Brooklyn, when the British took control of ...

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. It has been years since Chanel filed for a tax refund, given that she mostly works off the books. But this year, Auburn’s administrators have another plan. IT’S TAX TIME: GO GET YOUR REFUND reads a flyer at the shelter, where Chanel and Supreme must sign a “10 Day Contract” with Auburn, agreeing to file their tax return and bring proof of the filing. If they violate this contract, they may be forced out. They can stay, according to state law, only if they meet the shelter’s requirements, which include searching for an apartment and saving enough money to move. The goal is to find permanent housing, as the city’s shelters are meant to be “temporary” (a word that occurs thirty-four times in the state’s three-page regulation on shelter eligibility). 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 ...

There are many ways to map a city. Geographers rely on the standard compass of north, south, east, west. 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. They are part of a sprawling social service system known intimately to the poor. Their acronyms entered Dasani’s vocabulary when she was still learning to spell. She says “ACS” (child protection) or “DHS” (homeless services) the way a migrant child knows of “ICE” (immigration enforcement). Each agency represents a separate pillar of power, with its own offices, workers, and labyrinthine lines, its own shade of fluorescent lighting. But to Dasani’s mother, they are one and the same. They are limbs of a monolithic body called “the government”—a system that profits off the poor, says Chanel, while punishing them for that very condition. It is also one of the nation’s most generous systems. 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.” By almost any measure, the system is vast.

And finally, there is child protection—better known 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. She is among the 83 percent of students who qualify for free lunch at her school, the 16 million children growing up poor nationwide, and the 47 million Americans on food stamps.

Like other poor children, Dasani knows the precise date when her family’s food stamps replenish: the ninth of each month. Back when her grandmother Joanie first got food stamps, they came as coupons. Today, 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).

More money would come if the family got Supplemental Security Income, the disability benefit known as SSI. Two of the children show signs of a learning disability. Plenty of people rely on their SSI checks, but 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.

There are two categories of child maltreatment: abuse and neglect. Abuse, according to New York law, occurs when a parent inflicts or allows serious “physical injury” to the child. The most extreme cases make headlines that rile the public and shake up the agency. In 2006, two years after ACS began tracking Dasani’s family, seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death by her stepfather in Bed-Stuy. Reports of abuse surged, and a new law was passed in her name. Yet only 7 percent of ACS investigations involve findings of abuse. The vast majority of families—including Dasani’s—face charges of “neglect,” which is more about failure. A neglectful parent has failed to exercise “a minimum degree of care,” according to the law, by not supplying food, clothing, education, supervision, or shelter. It is no surprise that the vast majority of these parents are poor. Many use alcohol or drugs, which is another form of failure: Their addiction has caused them to lose “self-control” of their “actions.”

Dasani’s homeroom teacher, Miss Hester, knows plenty of families who are being monitored by ACS. She also knows that watching is not the same as helping. A child like Dasani could be watched for years while her poverty deepens and her prospects narrow. She is an eleven-year-old on the cusp of adolescence. She needs help now.

This is how Dasani finds herself sitting across from Roxanne, a blond student from Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service. While Dasani has never had a counselor, she already intuits the rules governing this arrangement—the fact that Roxanne is a “mandated reporter,” a person legally obliged to report abuse or neglect to the authorities. The warmth of her smile makes no difference. Just the words “How is your day going?” are enough to keep Dasani quiet. All it takes to enter the child protection system is one phone call. Anyone can make this call, from a professional like Roxanne to a jilted lover phoning anonymously. They dial a toll-free number, reaching an operator with the state’s child abuse hotline. The call is screened, and if it seems credible, an investigation begins. This makes Dasani so nervous that she googles “ACS questions” on the shelter’s recreational computer. “Just to know what they would ask and what answers I would have next.” Say the wrong thing and catastrophe awaits. “They can use that in a court of law against the parent,” says Dasani, who has heard the story of Supreme as a child, torn from his brothers without warning. Dasani would survive, she thinks, but not her youngest sister, Lee-Lee. Only Dasani speaks the baby’s language, discerning a wet diaper in her cries. What would happen to Lee-Lee in the hands of strangers? “Some people don’t know how to take care of babies,” Dasani says. This is where her mind goes when social worker...

Chanel, on the other hand, sees no need for help. Just the word “counseling” makes her stomach turn. She has enough outsiders meddling, none of whom are trying to raise eight children while homeless. The only way to keep a child in line is to be strict. In Chanel’s book, this is called discipline—the occasional belt smack or being told to stand in the corner. Everyone she knows was “raised by the belt” because “it saves a kid’s life.” 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. “My husband told me if you don’t instill the fear of God in them when they babies,” Chanel says, “there’s nothing you gonna be able to do when they get a certain age.”

“If she plans on hurting herself, I have to report it,” says Miss Moya. “If someone is hurting her, I have to report it. And if she plans on hurting someone else, I have to report it.” With that, Chanel poses a hypothetical question: What if her daughter says, “Oh, my mother beat my ass because I did something wrong?” Miss Moya explains that her job is to “gauge” each situation. The law, after all, permits physical discipline within limits. “If she told that to me,” says Miss Moya, “then there’s an assessment process and I speak to her about it. I’m not seeing a bruise on her. I’m not seeing her mouth busted open. I’m not seeing her head open wide.”

“I can see if a child is being abused or if they’re not being abused,” Miss Moya says. “You understand? There’s a difference….You can’t just call them with your suspicions. You have to be sure.” “People do it every day,” Chanel says, referring to the anonymous calls. “People do it every day,” Miss Moya says. “I agree. People do it every day. But I’m just letting you know that it’s a process.” The social worker’s strategy seems to work. Chanel backs off, allowing Dasani to stay in counseling. “I don’t wanna stop her from coming here,” Chanel says in a chipper tone, “because I don’t want her to feel like she’s limited. I want her to feel like any opportunity and open doors are for her and she can take ’em all if she wants, if she can handle them, you know?” Chanel gathers her things. Roxanne and Miss Moya trade a look of relief. “I’m cool with it,” Chanel says, heading for the door. “I understand what’s going on. If any problems, just call me, you know? Talk to me before you talk to the Man, because the Man ain’t no friend of ours.”

“Black is beautiful. Black is me,” Dasani sings under her breath as she walks outdoors with her two sisters and Chanel.