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

by Andrea Elliott

To Dasani, they seem more like robots, delivering verdicts in a monotone voice—how the family’s “public assistance case” has been “denied” or “turned back on,” how they have “violated” their latest “independent living plan” or fallen “out of compliance” with a work requirement. These verdicts are a part of Dasani’s vocabulary.

Whether Chanel is a “victim” or a “queen” depends on the observer. To conservatives, welfare harms the work ethic, making people dependent on the government. To progressives, welfare marginalizes the poor while failing to meet their needs. Lost in the vernacular of “welfare” is the word itself. It was enshrined in the 1787 preamble to the Constitution, commanding “the People of the United States” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is no accident that the Constitution connects welfare to posterity, which means all future generations.

American welfare began, like the country itself, with a British colonial model. Guided by the English poor laws of the 1600s, America’s colonists divided the downtrodden into two classes: the “worthy” and the “unworthy.” The worthy included widows, the blind, the elderly—none of whom could be blamed for their plight and thus deserved public aid. The unworthy poor, on the other hand, were seen to have chosen their condition—among them, beggars, drunks, and other undesirables who were banished to the poorhouse. Children in America migrated between these classes. Some landed in the draconian confines of the poorhouse, trading their labor for shelter and food. Others were placed with strangers, indentured as servants or apprenticed to tradesmen. Their fates, however grim, hardly compared with the horrors inflicted upon enslaved Black children. By the nineteenth century, a new system emerged to rescue the children of whites, and eventually of Blacks, placing them in orphanages, reformatories, and other institutions.

With inhumane work conditions and paltry wages, they were consigned to live in the city’s “tenant houses”—a term that morphed into “tenements”—dark, sooty, airless spaces crammed with hungry families. The Dickensian conditions of Manhattan’s tenements were an eerie precursor to Dasani’s life at Auburn. “One young immigrant described how his family of eight managed in a one-room residence,” writes the scholar Karen M. Staller.

This was the dawn of the first Gilded Age, a phrase coined by Mark Twain in a popular 1873 book, co-written with his friend Charles Dudley Warner, that satirized the greed and corruption of post–Civil War America. Industry had boomed, with half of the nation’s wealth concentrated in the hands of the one percent. America’s tycoons lived lavishly in the “seat of the empire,” as President George Washington once described New York—making

“There can be no more important subject from the standpoint of the nation,” President Roosevelt told his guests. “Because when you take care of the children, you are taking care of the nation of tomorrow.”

Most of the nation’s Black children still lived in the South—a fact cited by Booker T. Washington, one of only two African Americans included at the conference. Black families, he told the white audience, had long practiced the ideals being touted at Roosevelt’s meeting. “The negro, in some way, has inherited and has had trained into him the idea that he must take care of his own dependents, and he does it to a greater degree than is true perhaps of any other race,” said Washington, who hoped that Black Americans would stay in the rural South, where strong family ties kept children safe and where placing a child in an institution was seen as “a disgrace.”

Hall argued that childhood was a distinct phase of human development, which meant that children needed to act like children in order to become healthy adults. Rather than being forced to work, a child required nourishment and education. The “work” of young children was to play. Children became the driver of America’s future, making the 1900s the “Century of the Child”—the calling of the Progressive Era, whose reformers pushed to end child labor and tackle child poverty.

America’s first welfare mothers were overwhelmingly white.

When Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail, welfare was costing taxpayers an estimated $13 billion a year in federal dollars alone. Clinton would make good on his vow to “end welfare as we know it.”

Ah, yes and we all know how that worked out

1996 when President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Out went the old system—the one originating with the child advocates of the early twentieth century. In came a new program centered on the adults. The goal was to move them off welfare and into the workforce. If you needed money, you now applied for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, facing time limits on cash and a mandate to look for work.

When it comes to being poor, there are less generous places than New York, one of the nation’s archetypal “safety net” states. New Yorkers have greater access to public healthcare, food stamps, and state-administered welfare cash, which comes with fewer restrictions than federal welfare and no time limits. New York City is the only American metropolis that guarantees the legal right to shelter, year-round, for both families and single adults, including non-pregnant women. But in practice, shelter gets denied and food stamps cut off with the vagaries of each city administration.

“I don’t ever wanna hear, ‘Well, my mother told me to do this,’ unless you know that that’s the right thing,” Miss Hester tells the class. The teacher has shimmied into an empty desk next to Dasani. “I am telling you, as sure as I’m sitting here,” Miss Hester says, her arm resting across Dasani’s desk, “you’re gonna be held responsible for the choices you make.”

“There are people out there who are so hurt they don’t care about leaving here….They are looking for an opportunity to do something crazy and ridiculous. They have nothing to live for.” Dasani ponders this. “I am telling you to listen to your internal barometer,” Miss Hester says. “Think about your next move before you make your next move.”

Everyone needs a miss Hestor

Detachment is as much a rite of summer as sunbaked afternoons in the park.

“I didn’t have, you know, a proper role model,” Supreme says. “You know, you always tell your child, ‘Don’t put your hand in that fire. That fire’ll burn you.’ I didn’t have nobody tell me, ‘That fire gonna burn!’ ”

“The worst death is not a physical death,” Supreme says, “but a mental death.” He succumbs to the drudgery of welfare appointments and job-training programs until he snaps, his boredom giving way to the pursuit of revelation. He reads, he writes, he gets high.

Soon, state investigators are combing the building. They find that Auburn’s fire safety system is virtually inoperable. There is also no childcare, as legally mandated, nor does Auburn have the certificate of occupancy required to operate as a shelter. Black mold is spreading in the shelter’s bathrooms. The investigators release a devastating internal report: No young child with chronic breathing problems or serious medical conditions should be placed at the shelter, and no one under age two should live there at all. In other words, Dasani’s family—with a one-year-old (Lee-Lee), two asthmatic children (Papa and Avianna), and another child (Nana) who is legally blind—should never have been at Auburn in the first place. The exodus of Auburn’s families begins in October 2013.

It is strange, this feeling of heading toward an address they don’t have while saying goodbye—in the span of a few hours—to their longtime home. They pack whatever they can fit into twenty clear plastic bags. At 9:26 p.m. on October 17, 2013—more than three years after moving into Auburn—Chanel and her children board the last van. Turtle is still in the room. An hour later, they pull up to their new residence. Of all the shelters where Dasani’s family could have landed, they have somehow wound up on West 145th Street in Harlem—one block from the Bartendaz base.

It is a real apartment, with clean beige walls and hardwood floors. There are two bedrooms, a full bathroom, and a kitchen joined to a living room. Fresh, home-cooked meals again, Dasani thinks

In theory, federal law gives homeless children the right to stay in one school even as their families move around. But in practice, there are no guarantees.

They walk along North Portland Avenue, passing Auburn and the projects, where Dasani used to be known as a “shelter boogie.”

The New York Times publishes the first installment of a five-part series about Dasani, written by me and photographed by Ruth Fremson. GIRL IN THE SHADOWS: DASANI’S HOMELESS LIFE reads the headline. And for five consecutive days, Dasani’s story remains on the front page. The series draws a fierce reaction.

It was Goldfein who laid the groundwork for the children’s trust fund, recruiting the lawyers who created the trust and making recommendations on how the money should be spent. This is a constant source of tension: Chanel wants access to the money, which the trust does not allow. Only the children are beneficiaries. And besides, Goldfein reminds her, the donations could never meet all of the family’s needs, nor can they pay for anything that is already covered by public assistance.

There was a time in Principal Holmes’s career when she might have expected more from the child protection system. She was young and idealistic. Now she knows better. She reports negligent parents because it is the law—not because she thinks that children are better off in foster care. Usually it is the opposite. A child does better at home, even under the stress of ACS monitoring. For a child to truly thrive, says Holmes, her parents would be more than monitored. They would be given material help to fight housing instability, unemployment, food scarcity, segregated schools, and other afflictions common to the poor. Rarely does this happen. A child like Dasani is either surveilled by ACS and stays with her family, or she lands in the thicket of foster care. But is there a third option?

Most people associate Hershey with chocolate, or the theme park named for the chocolate, located in a Pennsylvania town by the same name. All three things—the chocolate, the park, the town—are owed to one person: Milton Hershey, the candy magnate, who died in 1945. He left behind a fourth institution that also bears his name. A clue can be found in small print on the wrapping of Hershey chocolate bars, stating that every candy sold “helps educate children in need through Milton Hershey School.”

Dasani might have a better shot, the principal says: She is athletic, bright, and already on the public radar. Her sister Avianna would have a harder time getting in. She failed the recent state exams for sixth graders. But both sisters must apply, Miss Holmes decides. Nothing could be worse than separating them. Either they go together or they don’t go at all. On June 23, the principal summons Dasani and Avianna to her office. “We found a school that can give you an opportunity…some opportunities…that I don’t think New York City can give you,”

“Where are we?” “School!” the students reply. Miss Hester lets the word sink in. School. Not home. There is no home for Miss Hester right now. Two months ago, she was evicted by her landlord in Bed-Stuy, who was clearing the building for renovation. It will sell one week from now, on September 11, 2014, for $1.2 million (nearly double its value the previous year). Miss Hester packed up her life, putting most things in storage. Then, with a few suitcases, she took her fifteen-year-old daughter to the Bronx homeless intake office, joining more than sixty-four thousand New Yorkers now in city shelters. Miss Hester knows it would devastate her students if she told them this. She has always been their beacon, the one who made it out of the projects and into the professional class. But Miss Hester also knows that in today’s shelter system, she is no exception. Plenty of working New Yorkers have been uprooted by eviction. The city’s lack of affordable housing is the primary reason that families enter the shelter system.

She has landed a Section 8 voucher, the coveted federal housing subsidy, which helps pay the rent. A voucher is like a ticket to any part of the city. Chanel has only to pick a neighborhood and start looking for rentals. For years, she has lived in places chosen by others—bureaucrats in crowded offices, administrators of the shelter system. She was like a pawn on a chess board, moved around by unseen hands. The randomness made it easier for Chanel to disown the failures that followed. This was always the pattern, to blame her troubles on someone else. But now the hands on the chessboard are gone, leaving Chanel to make her own next move. She wants to choose wisely.

Nearly half of the neighborhood’s residents live below the poverty line.

Dasani got suspended after fighting some girls who were making fun of Nana’s thick glasses. Now Dasani wants to return to McKinney. She looks at the water, misty and gray. She already knows that this commute is unsustainable. But she had to try it. Only McKinney feels like home.

Since entering Dasani’s life as a newspaper reporter, I have slowly morphed into “Drea,” the person who “hangs out,” taking notes with the pen that also records sound. Dasani knows that I am now writing a book, which requires spending large swaths of time with her family. This makes me less of a traditional reporter and more of an “immersionist”—a journalistic label that means little to most people. Lee-Lee calls it like it is: I am in her house. This does not mean that I am always welcome. Chanel is tired of hearing me explain the rules of my profession when I decline to give her cash. (In the years to come, I will sometimes cave, bringing groceries or helping in other ways—especially at Christmas. I am, after all, human.)

McKinney already knew that Dasani had landed a two-month “superintendent’s suspension” in Staten Island, after fighting the girls who were bullying Nana. This meant that Dasani would have to report to a “suspension site.” There are thirty-seven such schools in New York City, with around eight thousand students passing through this academic year—the majority of them Black, consigned to a system known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The setting of Dasani’s suspension site, Mount Loretto in Staten Island, has its origins in the first Gilded Age, when a Catholic priest took up the cause of homeless children, opening one of the nation’s largest orphanages.

Milton gave $60 million worth of his company’s shares to the school, and eventually his entire fortune. “It’s a sin for a man to die rich,” he told his friends.

The school’s own fortunes have skyrocketed. The trust that funds the school owns a controlling share of the Hershey Chocolate Company. This endowment, which can be spent only on the school, was valued at $12.2 billion in 2015 (and surpassed $17.6 billion by 2020). This makes the Milton Hershey School wealthier than all but a few American universities.

Children as young as four can board here year-round, entering in preschool and staying until the twelfth grade. Their “houseparents” act as surrogate mothers and fathers, driving the students to soccer games and dentist appointments and helping them with homework. The children are groomed at the school’s salon. They get a fresh uniform for each day of the week, as well as swimsuits, Crocs, nightgowns, socks, slippers, and dresses or suits and ties. If their teeth are crooked, they will soon be wearing braces—all of this covered by the trust. Hershey’s students are a cross-section of poor America. Nearly 44 percent are white, 33 percent Black, and 9 percent Latino. Only low-income families can apply; the average student’s family earns $17,207, well below the federal poverty line. Most come from Pennsylvania, per the deed of trust, while a quarter have crossed state lines from as far away as Iowa, Texas, California, and Puerto Rico. Among these children, Dasani’s struggles are not unusual. About one in five of Hershey’s students has been homeless, nearly a third have had a parent incarcerated, and half have witnessed drug or alcohol abuse. Hundreds of students have avoided foster care by enrolling at Hershey as part of agreements made between their families and child protection workers. They are leaving homes of scarcity to attend the richest private school for children in America.

While the school describes itself as nondenominational, Christian scripture is all around. The children attend a mandatory chapel service every Sunday and say grace before dinner.

The two mothers hug. They have already discussed Dasani’s “four-week adjustment plan.” Chanel is allowed one weekly phone call to Dasani, at a predesignated time. There are no visits for an entire month—a separation that is designed to help incoming students form new bonds, particularly with their houseparents. This can bring a swell of emotions: sadness, guilt, confusion, rage. Some children rebel, hoping their transgressions will send them home. But the longer they can endure this separation, the better they will do. The ultimate goal is for Hershey’s students to become independent and “lead fulfilling and productive lives.” The unspoken message is clear. In order to leave poverty, Dasani must also leave her family—at least for a while.