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

by Andrea Elliott

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 ...