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

by Andrea Elliott

To be found “eligible” by the city’s homeless services meant that you had been found ineligible by your closest kin. The shelter was only open because your family had shut the door.

The city’s new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, was promising to tackle the crisis. He had taken office the previous year, in 2002, as one of the richest men in the world, generating skepticism among homeless advocates. What could a billionaire know about the poor? Yet solutions were needed, and Bloomberg had built his fortune on the strength of his innovations. After coming to New York in 1966, fresh out of Harvard Business School, Bloomberg took a low-ranking job at Salomon Brothers. The Boston native rented a studio apartment that he divided with a curtain, calling it a one-bedroom. After rising through the ranks, making partner at the firm and then getting fired, Bloomberg parlayed his $10 million severance package into a global media empire, famously inventing a digital information system that became indispensable to bond traders. Bloomberg ran for mayor on a Republican ticket (after leaving the Democratic Party) and in the fractured political environment following the September 11 attacks, he won by a small margin, inheriting a ravaged city.

These short-lived experiments drew ridicule. But the ships came to symbolize Bloomberg’s position: Shelters should be a temporary vessel on the way to self-sufficiency, not a destination. “Our own policies needlessly encourage entry and prolong dependence on shelters,” the mayor said in 2004, taking aim at one policy in particular. For decades, the city had helped homeless families jump the waitlist for public housing. Only a small fraction of those families returned to shelters. But from Bloomberg’s perspective, this policy gave families an incentive to enter the shelter system: They were becoming homeless to gain access to the projects or to Section-8 vouchers, the federal rent subsidy program. With the economy growing, Bloomberg adopted a new set of policies intended to make the homeless more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing. Instead, they would receive short-term help with the rent. Promising to make “chronic homelessness effectively extinct,” Bloomberg revamped the shelter system with a sophisticated database to track this population and a program offering job training, legal assistance, and other supports. He also created the Center for Economic Opportunity, a city-run “innovation lab” that would spend $662 million on poverty prevention programs emphasizing jobs and education. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor told his aides, and homelessness would decline.

It was only when Supreme fell for a twenty-year-old named Kylia that he wanted to get married and settle down. Seeking a new city, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Supreme found work as a barber. They were living at a homeless shelter on August 26, 2003, when his wife—now pregnant with their third child—fell down a flight of stairs to her death. In an autopsy, the district’s deputy medical examiner found that twenty-five-year-old Kylia had an enlarged heart and had died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Supreme returned to New York a widower with two young children. In lieu of family, he had the shelter system.

This was a country, Supreme told Chanel, with an educational system, a government, a police force, and a job market that kept people of color trapped in “the false hope of an American Dream.” “It’s all a trick, not real,” he said. “It’s all been built up to destroy us systematically, on all levels….To empower others, at the expense of crushing the Black man, father, and husband—to render him totally ineffective and stagnant.”

Dasani would grow up to be a leader, he predicted. And in the meantime, her parents “were going to break the chain of slavery,” Chanel said. “We were gonna change their food. We were gonna change the way they think. Cuz what you put in is what you get out.” Chanel began wrapping her head in a scarf and stopped eating pork. She promised to stay off drugs. Over the next year, two incomplete families fused into one. They took the train to Bed-Stuy so that Supreme could meet Joanie. She seemed pleased with Chanel’s reformation, and cautiously approved of Supreme. On February 4, Chanel, Supreme, and their four children went to the city clerk’s office to get married. There was no wedding ceremony, no dress or cake. None of that mattered to Chanel, for the act alone represented a victory. No one she knew got married anymore.

Dasani remembers herself, as a little girl, riding the train. She was too small to touch the floor with her feet. They dangled from the plastic seats that her grandmother cleaned for a living. Some trains went so fast that Dasani felt she was flying. She would cover her ears when the brakes screeched. She watched as the doors opened like mouths, spitting out a dozen people before swallowing a new batch. Then back into the tunnel they went. She called this “traveling with Mommy.” Or just “traveling.” They were always traveling, it seemed, while never arriving.

By kindergarten, Dasani had also memorized the “supreme alphabet,” learning to break down the hidden meaning of words. This was an alternate form of knowledge, her stepfather said, a way of tackling the white establishment. The library was where the “lies are buried.” A television was “telling a lie vision.” Sometimes the two codes worked in tandem. The number 7 meant “God,” which was interchangeable with “Allah,” the meaning of the letter A. This meant that Dasani’s grandmother Joanie was cleaning the Allah train, the train of God. Five-year-old Dasani clung to Joanie, whose apartment in Bed-Stuy became a weekend haven. They would sit for hours, Dasani in her grandma’s lap as Joanie combed “the mess out of my hair.” They went to church and to Fulton Mall, where Joanie splurged on dolls and fussy outfits for Dasani. She knew all of the child’s likes and dislikes, fixing her favorite BLT sandwich (despite Chanel’s prohibition of bacon) and taking Dasani for double chocolate chip pancakes at the IHOP on Livingston Street. “Don’t be the same, like your mother and me,” Joanie told Dasani. “Go to school and graduate.”

Chanel and Supreme had a temperamental love, which their children tracked like the weather. They knew a storm was brewing when Supreme stopped talking. He would act like Chanel no longer existed. Then her anger would rise until it burst like thunder. Supreme cowered from her, at least in the early years. Over time, he lost all decorum, fighting back as if Chanel were a man. They went blind in such moments. Their words flew, their bodies crashed. Dasani learned to hustle the children into a corner. Some fights ended with Supreme packing his clothes and grabbing the two children from his first marriage—four-year-old Nana and five-year-old Khaliq. “Mommy!” they would shriek to Chanel as their father whisked them away, snarling that Chanel was not their “real” mother. Chanel’s retort was to say that Khaliq and Nana were “his income.” Without them, Supreme would lose the monthly cash stipend known as survivors benefits, which provided for the care of Nana and Khaliq. It became clear, in such moments, that the children divided along bloodlines. Chanel’s two stepchildren, Khaliq and Nana, would remain with their father; Supreme’s two stepchildren, Dasani and Avianna, would stay with their mother. Maya and Hada went without comment. They were babies, after all. They needed their mother.

The practice of drug-screening newborns and their mothers—often without informed consent—had become common in public hospitals. With Papa’s test results in hand, the staff alerted the city’s child protection agency. Chanel and Supreme were summoned to the agency’s office in Bedford-Stuyvesant—the same brick building where Supreme had been brought as a child. As he stood there in the lobby, the memory came rushing back. He was nine years old. His sister had just died. His parents were under investigation and he was about to be separated from his three brothers—the very thing Supreme had always feared. Twenty years later, the same fear would pass to Supreme and Chanel’s children. Six-year-old Dasani grew accustomed to knocks at the door. In walked caseworkers for the agency known as ACS. They came asking questions, looking through the fridge. They were searching for signs of neglect (not enough food) or abuse (bruises or welts). They inspected each child, one by one, from head to toe.

The temperature dipped below freezing. Joanie’s body ached in weather like this. But she kept such things to herself. It was still morning, too early to take a break from her shift. A few minutes after 9 a.m., she set down her bucket and went to the crew room to drink some hot tea. A supervisor noticed the absence and filed a disciplinary complaint, reporting that Joanie had taken a twenty-minute “unauthorized break, lounging in the lunchroom.” Specifically, she had broken Transit Rules & Regulations 2A, 2B, 4A, 4B, 10A, and 11E—a total of six violations for one cup of tea. Joanie was asked to explain. “I was cold,” she wrote.

Clues to her condition were hidden in her work file. On February 7, 2008, she requested a three-day sick leave, complaining of lower back pain. Her superiors warned that she could be placed on the “sick control list.” With that, Joanie stopped going to work. She said nothing to Chanel, who faced her own crisis. For the last eighteen months, she had been paying rent with the city’s time-limited subsidy—the program designed to encourage financial independence. As the subsidy decreased, the renter was expected to bridge the gap. By February, Chanel had defaulted. The family was once again homeless, moving to a shelter in Flatbush.

Joanie was pronounced dead. She was fifty-four years old. She took her last breath at the same hospital where Dasani, six years earlier, had come into the world.

Joanie’s death brought a rebirth. She had left behind a small fortune, saved from eight years of cleaning subway trains, for which she had earned a total of $280,752. Her combined pension, death benefits, and unclaimed pay would be divided among her three surviving children: Chanel, Lamont, and Shamell. Chanel’s portion of the inheritance came to $49,000. She had never touched so much money. Her mind flooded with ideas. She and Supreme would open a Five Percent youth center, or perhaps a barbershop. They could finally quit the shelter system. By sheer luck, the city was offering a new subsidy to homeless families. Called Advantage, it worked like the last program Chanel had tried, giving temporary help with the rent. But this time, she brought her own advantage: her inheritance.

Staten Island, as the name suggests, is no easy place to reach. On the map, it looks like a reluctant fifth borough, severed from Brooklyn’s western shore. There is no subway line connecting to the island, which spans sixty square miles. The only way to get there is by crossing the water, either by ferry or car, on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. After it opened in 1964, some realtors steered African Americans to the economically depressed North Shore, where housing projects overlooked abandoned factories and destitute streets.

“When they’re happy, I’m happy. When they’re sad, I’m sad. It’s like I have a connection, like I’m stuck to them like glue.”

This was, without question, the high point of their lives. It would take years for Chanel to understand why things fell apart. It was not obvious, in that blinding moment, that money could be useful only if they knew how to spend it. To think it would bring salvation was like asking a set of keys to drive a car. Money could not erase the past. When customers took a seat in Supreme’s chair at the barbershop, they saw a pair of hands expertly at work. They did not see the boy who, at age seven, had learned that very skill by cutting his brothers’ hair while his parents were high. What money brought was an escape from all of that.

Chanel had pulmonary tuberculosis—likely a recurrence of the illness she had contracted as a child, at a homeless shelter in Queens. Here in Staten Island, a doctor gave Chanel the Percocet, saying it would relieve her pain. After three weeks in the hospital, she was discharged with a prescription for OxyContin—120 pills per month. As Chanel got hooked on Oxy, she kept telling herself that a doctor had prescribed it. This was “medicine.” How could it be “unhealthy”? Soon, Supreme was also addicted to opioids, joining the tide of white Americans who had fallen to the same fate. When Dasani’s parents could no longer buy pills on the street, they turned to heroin, keeping their habit below the radar of ACS. Supreme and Chanel bobbed and weaved through a fog of addiction. In their best moments, they held jobs—Supreme as a barber and Chanel as a park maintenance employee, earning $3,038 in 2009. But no job lasted, and Chanel’s inheritance was soon spent.

More than a quarter of the families who signed up for Advantage became homeless again, returning to a shelter system that spends roughly $3,000 per month on each family—more than double Supreme and Chanel’s rent subsidy.

Dasani hated to wait. Finally her family’s number flashed across a screen. A space had opened up at Auburn Family Residence, a shelter in the northern Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. Of the city’s 152 family shelters, Dasani was being sent to live in the place where her grandmother had been born.

At Auburn, the offense was chronic homelessness. And among the offenders were hundreds of children whose families had been identified as “the longest-term stayers” in need of “intensive case management” to find jobs and apartments. It did not help that Auburn’s only housing specialist had died a year earlier, never to be replaced—just as Brooklyn was becoming one of the most expensive rental markets in America. Dasani adapted to Auburn’s dehumanizing rituals. She learned to wait in line for the shelter’s prepackaged “Swedish meatballs,” ignoring the roaches in the water dispenser and the mouse pellets on the ground. She learned to keep time, nudging her mother to meet the shelter’s 10 p.m. curfew. If Chanel missed it, they would be “logged out,” which meant that the entire family would have to travel to the Bronx intake center to get “logged back in,” while the children missed school. She watched in silence as Auburn’s guards rifled through her family’s bags, tossing out glass bottles and canned food in the name of “security”—even as drugs, guns, and lovers came in through the fire escape. She found ways to verbally trick herself. She called her living arrangement “the house,” even after her family was moved into one cramped room. She choreographed her own privacy, taking turns with her siblings to undress while the others looked away. They maneuvered around the shelter’s rules as well. Residents were banned from bringing in bleach, yet the janitors refused to clean the ba...

To mess with Chanel was to mess with Dasani. There was no separating mother from daughter. They felt the same anger, the same humiliation. Feelings passed between them like oxygen.

Smaller degradations were a part of daily life. The shelter’s rule against irons meant that residents went to job interviews wearing wrinkled clothes.

In every measurable way, Star was better off than Dasani. She had spent her childhood in the same apartment, anchored to one place. She had only one sibling, and though her father was an alcoholic, her mother, Bonita, worked a string of jobs to cover the family’s $619 rent. Bonita fussed over each child’s graduations, starting in kindergarten. She believed that these mini ceremonies paved the way forward. 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. None of these granular differences needed airing when Star and Dasani met. The equation was simple: Star had a home, so she was the winner. Perhaps this explains Dasani’s first act of aggression. She grabbed Star’s apartment keys and dangled them provocatively. Star watched in disbelief as Dasani flung the keys to Star’s apartment at the sewer. This was a brazen act for any child, not to mention a homeless girl. When Star returned home, she told her mother about the new girl. “You know what to do,” Bonita said. “She hit you, you hit her back.”

At the urging of ACS, Chanel had enrolled in a new drug treatment program. She was taking methadone, a legal synthetic opioid that was pioneered to treat heroin addicts in New York City in the 1960s. A daily dose of methadone could block the euphoric effects of heroin, oxycodone, and other opioids while relieving the craving for these drugs. Yet Chanel questioned the logic of trading one drug for another. Was methadone that much better? It left her light-headed and sluggish. No one seemed to leave the program. “It’s an all-your-life thing,” she said.

The truth unfolded in spurts. A staff member had paid a resident $10 to empty the room, perhaps thinking that Chanel was gone for good. Some families get logged out and never come back. Within hours, residents had looted the room, stealing valuables and other items. Nearly everything else was tossed in the garbage. Chanel bolted out the back of the shelter, setting off a fire alarm. There, a large metal incinerator held Auburn’s rotting trash. She waded in as the garbage rose to her stomach. She plunged her hands through soiled diapers and rotting food, feeling for the smooth curves of her mother’s urn. She felt her mother trapped, everything closing in. This could not be Joanie’s final resting place, she told herself. The stench made her gag. The trash sank beneath her feet. This dumpster was, unbeknownst to Chanel, a few feet from the former morgue of Cumberland Hospital. She cursed and wept. She heard someone calling. She flailed her arms, throwing trash in all directions. Finally she stopped. She stood there in the dark. She could do nothing to reverse the fact that fifty-seven years after her mother was born, right here in this building, her remains had been lost in the garbage.

Chanel paced the room. She was broke. Her children were due to start school the next day. She expected no help from Supreme, who was staying with his cousin in Staten Island. Nor did she think the Auburn staff would care. Still, she went to the trouble of filing a complaint, summarizing her grievance at the top of the form with “All of my belongs went in garbbage.” She then wrote, in hurried print, “I don’t know what to do my kid start school tomarrow and I have nothing.” She added, almost tangentially, that her caseworker had recently “groped” her—a problem so common that she never thought to file a separate complaint. She ended on a conciliatory note: “Peace.”

For child maltreatment cases in New York’s family court, the poor have a right to free counsel. A judge assigned lawyers to each of the parties: one for Chanel, one for Supreme, and one for all seven children. In court on September 20, 2011, the children’s lawyer, Marty Feinman, objected to removing the children. He was “not convinced,” he told the judge, “that it’s in the children’s best interest—seven children—to take them out of this environment where they are living together…and have them wind up in foster homes, who knows where in the city and going to school or daycare or getting assistance who knows where.” To divide Dasani and her siblings would, Feinman argued, “present a greater imminent risk to the children than remaining where they are.”

Take care of each other. This meant many things. It meant staying out of trouble, for Supreme ruled by fear. If the children laughed too loud, he yelled “Shut up!” and they froze, a silent dread passing among them. If they broke the rules, they would surely get the belt. Chanel had softened Supreme, just as Joanie’s urn had tempered Chanel. In the absence of these matriarchs, a new order would come. Supreme summed it up in two words, writing in black marker on the wall near Dasani’s bed: “King Me!”

They all had funny nicknames. Muka, Mama, Papa, God, Nana, Hada, Maya, Lee-Lee. They did not know the origins of these names, which had come as fast as Chanel now braided their hair, starting in the morning so she could finish by sundown. The girls winced as Chanel brushed out their tresses, parting them into sections. Her fingers flew in a blur, leaving row after row of tightly wound perfection. No one would be calling her girls “nappy,” especially when she wasn’t around to set the matter straight. By the time she finished the last of her girls’ crowns, her hands were numb. Sherry braided the children in her own way, trying to keep them in line. Were they doing their homework and making decent grades? No one, to her mind, had more potential than Dasani. She had been born with a lucky mix of intelligence and willpower. But she also had her mother’s temper, pouncing at any slight. Such radioactivity could be her ruin.

Fighting makes her feel powerful. It distracts from other feelings—from what she will learn, years from now, to call “being vulnerable.” “Cuz I don’t like to be nice, cuz then kids take advantage,” she tells me during a lunch break. Some feelings, she reserves for her poems, most recently, one she calls “Alone”: I cry all day Couldn’t find land Nowhere to stand On a boat without a friend Sharks trying to eat me I’m dead again Dasani continues to see her counselor at school, Roxanne. They meet to play Mancala and to talk about “anger management”—a concept that Dasani finds odd. She does not consider her anger a thing to be “managed”—especially if this interferes with her ability to fight. Anger is critical to winning a fight. And only if Dasani wins does she keep her reputation—and her body—safe. By this equation, anger + fighting = triumph = survival. No adult at McKinney is going to tell Dasani to stop surviving.

The next morning, the sisters wake to shouting. Supreme shoves Chanel in the back. The children start to cry as their father packs. Dasani’s stepsiblings—Nana and Khaliq—go quiet when this happens, as if their silence might erase them from view. They know that if Supreme leaves, he will take them along. The last time they left, Nana was just five years old, and Khaliq six. Supreme stops packing. “I’m staying,” he says.

Sometimes Dasani wanders to the other side of Fort Greene Park, finding a sweeping lawn where, on sunny days, light-skinned women sunbathe or play tennis near a water fountain retrofitted for dogs. She never sees those ladies at the Bravo Supermarket for Values, just a few steps north on Myrtle, where Polaroids of thieves fill the store’s “Wall of Shame.” Wearing naked expressions, they are forced to pose with their stolen items—things like Goya beans and Kraft cheese. A woman named Mary holds a can of tuna in a photograph titled “Catch of the Day.” Dasani reasons that wealth belongs to “the whites” because “they save their money and don’t spend it on drinking and 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. Exposure to the moneyed classes has its upsides. A growing tax base can improve public schools and parks while beefing up services like garbage collection. Ideally, gentrification also changes what scholars call “the geography of opportunity,” by expanding the social networks of the poor and making some children more likely to attend college.

The early pioneers of Fort Greene’s gentrification were, in fact, African American. In the 1960s—long after the neighborhood was redlined, allowing banks to disinvest—Black middle-class families took ownership of Fort Greene’s brownstones. The 1980s and 1990s brought a cultural revival that is likened to the Harlem Renaissance, with Black writers, musicians, and actors planting roots in Fort Greene—among them Chris Rock, Erykah Badu, and Branford Marsalis. Their de facto mayor was Spike Lee, whose homegrown 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It takes place in the neighborhood. By the time Dasani was born here, in 2001, Fort Greene was the beating heart of what Essence magazine called Brooklyn’s “Black Mecca,” a neighborhood that Black families had dominated for half a century. It was on a bench in Fort Greene Park that Richard Wright had written passages of his landmark 1940 novel, Native Son. Then came a seismic change. Much of it began in 2003, with Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to remake downtown Brooklyn. Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, developers broke ground on nineteen luxury buildings in Fort Greene, all in the span of three years. Within a decade, the neighborhood’s real estate prices had doubled and its portion of white residents had jumped by 80 percent—while an estimated three-quarters of Fort Greene’s Black-owned businesses closed. Brooklyn was seeing the opposite of white flight—a white landing of sorts. This was coded in the language of class: the arriv...

Dasani’s mother sometimes wonders what would happen if Brooklyn’s newcomers spent some time with the borough’s older self. On Myrtle, opposite the wine shop, they would find a barber named China whose chairs are always full. A din of chatter fills the barbershop, where a tank of swimming turtles sits at the window. Dasani loves to watch them glide through the water. Her favorite turtle is missing its toes. China’s clippers fly over the skulls of men who were boys back when Myrtle was known as “Murder Avenue.” Some of them came of age when Chanel’s favorite Marvin Gaye song, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” first hit the airwaves in 1971—the same year that Dasani’s grandmother Joanie fell in love with Sonny Boy. Three generations later, Dasani’s “inner city” is a place on the outside.

order to cooking, you know? Everything has an order….I like law and order. I don’t like disorganization.” This may sound odd coming from a man with no wallet. But when Supreme cooks, everything falls into place. At tonight’s baby shower, the Sykes family will be treated to Supreme’s signature dish: “honey barbecue chicken wings with crushed pineapple.” He places an emphasis on the word “crushed”—not sliced nor diced. He adds “a little hint” of vanilla and “a pinch” of nutmeg in order “to mess with the people’s palate.” Therein lies the secret of the sauce.

Chanel can still picture it—the two of them standing at the same window, peering at their newborns as Dasani’s cries mixed with Khaliq’s. Who would have guessed that these two random children would later join the same family, sharing one mother after the other passed away?

Papa does not see these things as bad or ugly. They are the topography of his childhood. An empty beer can is to be crushed and kicked until something else catches his eye. Papa is fond of things that move of their own accord, like spiders, cats, roaches, and worms. By the time he resurfaces with sludge on his shoes and stones in his pockets, everyone is tired of calling his name.

Chanel knows how to make an entrance. The children are her opening act, crashing into the room like lightning. She follows at an elegant pace, her chin held high, as if to say, “I’m raising eight kids. What have you done lately?” There is Aunt Margo, arms flung wide. She is unquestionably Chanel’s favorite aunt. At fifty-six, Margo still looks like a doll, with thick lashes, cherry lipstick, and flowing ringlets. It used to be Joanie who greeted guests with a booming “Hellooo!” but since her death, Margo is filling in. Her pregnant granddaughter, Justina, circles the room in red flats and a smart blazer. She is joined by her sister Destiny and her cousin Little Sherelle. All of them had lost their mothers to AIDS. The young women hug Dasani as Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy rattle the speakers: I’ma always want you When nobody wants you If I die now My love’ll still haunt you

Miss Hester stands up in class and takes a risk. “I was different, and I don’t regret it.” She rarely talks about her childhood. She prefers to think about the future. But her students are growing up in the kind of place that she escaped, and she wants them to hear her story. “I knew I didn’t want to stay there,” she continues. “And I wasn’t making any sacrifices to stay. I was making sacrifices to leave. To exit, okay?” The classroom falls to a hush. For Dasani, it is strange to hear a teacher talking about Bed-Stuy. “The Stuy” is where her mother came of age, where her grandmother came to rest, and where Dasani still goes to ACS appointments—in the very building where Supreme had been separated, at age nine, from his siblings. Teachers are supposed to be from some other place. It was like hearing that the crossing guard had gone to prom with Dasani’s mother. Miss Hester grew up in the Stuy.

Miss Hester would do better, her mother kept saying. She would graduate from high school, earning the lifestyle enjoyed by whites. You have to be better than them, her mother insisted. You have to work harder than them.

By the time Miss Hester was sixteen, she had performed well enough to apply to college, winning a scholarship to SUNY Cortland. If Miss Hester had been a boy, this would have landed as good news. Her brothers were the proof. One would become a lawyer and another a psychologist. But girls, according to her mother, did not leave home for college. They “married their way out” of the projects. Stubbornly, Miss Hester packed a large orange suitcase. When her mother refused to take her to the bus station, she left alone, dragging her suitcase along Park Avenue. She would clean houses to support herself in college, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English followed by two master’s degrees from Touro College in 2004. Back in the projects, people sneered that Miss Hester was trying to “be white.” None of it mattered, she says. She can hold her own anywhere she goes. Her diction has range. She switches back and forth, from “ain’t” to “isn’t,” ignoring anyone who considers this a betrayal. “It takes a lot of courage to be different,” she now tells her students at McKinney. Dasani is listening carefully. “Sometimes you have to be alone,” says Miss Hester, looking around the classroom. “I don’t regret it for one second,” she says, slamming her hand on a desk. “That was the path!” The class is motionless. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” says Miss Hester, her voice trembling. “There are going to be some places in your life where you feel bizarre. You feel outstanding. And rema...

When Dasani looks into the future, she sees who she won’t be. She won’t be a dropout. She won’t do drugs or smoke or drink. She won’t join a gang.

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.”

Dasani and Star squirm in their seats. Out on the street, Star projects privilege, parading her pit bull puppy like a trophy. No one sees her life at home, where Star’s alcoholic father lies bedridden and dying. And out on the street, Dasani exudes strength, beating the boys at pull-ups in the park. No one sees how tired she gets from waking up with Lee-Lee, or how much Dasani longs for a dog of her own. These are the things that neither girl would dare disclose. To be vulnerable is to be punk.

Dasani is learning to hide her feelings. She shrugs them away, as if swatting flies. Her face goes blank. Her eyes drift. Sometimes she avoids the sadness altogether, preempting it the way detectives do with crime. She knows, for example, that when the school year ends, a cascade of goodbyes will come. She must part with the most reliable adults in her life—the teachers, the security guards, the cafeteria staff, the nurses. So Dasani pulls away first, acting distant or hurried. This year, the losses mount. Dasani’s counselor, Roxanne, won’t be returning to McKinney. “You the only person I can talk to,” Dasani tells Roxanne.

Every year, the children’s birthdays come in a mad springtime rush: Lee-Lee’s in March, Avianna’s in April, and the remaining six in the span of three and a half weeks. Expectations are calibrated based on where a birthday falls in the monthly cash flow. Those at the start of the month have high hopes, while those at the end of the month are luckless. So it goes for Avianna. Supreme hands her $11, a dollar for each year of her life. The next day, he asks for $5 back. She waits for a cake that never comes. Finally the children light two small candles. Like carolers, they hold the candles beneath Avianna’s face and sing. A week later, she takes her last dollar bill and folds it delicately, like a Japanese fan. She then places it inside a homemade card that Chanel opens on Mother’s Day. This year, birthday season collides with four of the children’s graduations. They need new outfits, and money for class photos. “Do you know how much time and thought goes into the hustle?” Chanel tells me. “You have to think it through.” By the time Dasani’s twelfth birthday comes, she tries to ignore it. She has already asked her mother to pay for a school trip to Washington. She will hold out for that, letting the birthday pass quietly.

“To plan is to fail,” as her mother says. Yet today, Chanel has a plan. She gathers the children around, gently lifting a vanilla sheet cake from its plastic casing. Dasani stares in wonder. The top of the cake is blank. Chanel covers it with candles and dims the lights. The time has come to sing. Dasani closes her eyes. If I could grant you three wishes, what would they be? her counselor, Roxanne, had asked. A house of our own, a lot of money, and three more wishes was Dasani’s answer.

Dasani and Nana race to the back of the bus, where the motor keeps the seats warm. They sit pressed together, newly reconciled. Dasani is soon asleep. The little ones watch, thumbs in mouths, as their mother closes her eyes. Every time the bus slows, she snaps awake. On the train, she can doze off completely without missing her stop. How she does this remains a mystery. She lives entirely in the present, wearing no watch and following no calendar. Yet the important things she remembers—the date of her next welfare appointment, the anniversary of her mother’s death. An internal alarm will sound, disrupting an otherwise unplanned life. The rest of her days are lived minute to minute. Mealtime is signaled by the yank of hunger, bedtime by drooping lids. It takes an emergency to jolt this pattern. Just the other day, Supreme began coughing uncontrollably. For the first time, Chanel thought, “What would I do if he died? We have no money to cremate him.”

Dasani freezes. Once her mother gets angry, the vitriol is hard to stop. And nothing triggers Chanel like the provocations of her firstborn daughter. She has vested enormous authority in Dasani, making her the family’s second-in-command. This is both a privilege and a burden. Dasani’s strength, competence, and agility—the very attributes that could lift her into a better life—also make her indispensable, threatening to keep her mired in the problems Chanel cannot meet alone. Lately, Chanel seems taunted by her dependence on Dasani. It’s as if her daughter is holding up a mirror, showing Chanel her own failures.