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

by Andrea Elliott

Dasani’s schoolmates talk of becoming rap stars or athletes, escaping their world with one good break. She also subscribes to this logic. Her life is defined by extremes. In order to leave extreme poverty, it follows that she must become extremely rich or extremely something. Precisely what, she is unsure. Even to dream is an act of faith. “I don’t dream at all,” Dasani says. “Even when I try.” She believes in what she can see, and Miss Hester is real. She left the projects for a place that Dasani cannot yet conjure. And she did it by working hard enough to win a scholarship to college. But even Miss Hester knows that her example is hard to match, especially for a girl like Dasani. “She has what I didn’t have—all those young siblings,” the teacher says. “She has allegiance to them and that’s a problem, if any of them don’t see leaving as important.” Dasani is the typical “parentified child,” though her penchant for self-sacrifice runs especially deep. She is the kind of girl, Miss Hester says, who “will put the mask on everyone else and the oxygen runs out.”