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

by Andrea Elliott

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.