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

by Andrea Elliott

For these are all our children. We will all profit from, or pay for, what they become. —James Baldwin

Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.

Supreme and Chanel have been scolded about their lack of financial discipline in countless meetings with city agencies. But when that money arrives, they do not think about abstractions like “personal responsibility” and “self-reliance.” They lose themselves in the delirium that a round of ice creams brings. They feel the sudden, exquisite rush born of wearing gold teeth again—of appearing like a person who has, rather than a person who lacks.

It is a less-known fact that Brooklyn was built on the backs of slaves, brought here by the Dutch in 1626 to clear land, build roads, and work the tobacco plantations. When the British took the colony nearly four decades later, renaming it for the Duke of York, the importation of slaves began in earnest. The colony’s enslaved population swelled to 13,500, making it the largest slaveholding territory in the North. And nowhere in New York was the concentration of slaves higher than in Brooklyn—one-third of the population.

Entitlement is born of self-worth. Some kids have it naturally. Others must develop it against the proof of their experience.

Since Bloomberg took office, the number of homeless families has risen by 80 percent. They are now staying in shelters for the longest period on record. When asked about this in August 2012, Bloomberg replied that the city’s shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

It is Dasani’s belief that she and her siblings are the cause of her mother’s ruin. It never occurs to her that for Chanel, the children represent her only accomplishment.

Jim Crow was there Blocking their way. Causing them grief Day after day. These men fought evil That enveloped the land. They battled for freedom With one tied hand. —Ivan J. Houston, veteran of World War II

For Black veterans like June, a different life awaited. They were largely denied the GI Bill supports that lifted their white comrades into the middle class. Job training programs catered overwhelmingly to whites, as did universities and financial institutions. There was little that a scholarship or a mortgage could do for an African American veteran when colleges and banks turned down his applications. The GI Bill, like the military, answered to a Jim Crow South.

Out of nearly 71,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill in New York and northeastern New Jersey in 1950, less than 1 percent went to nonwhite veterans. Yet home ownership was key to accruing wealth. White American families would eventually amass a median net worth nearly ten times that of Black families. Put another way, the exclusion of African Americans from real estate—not to mention college, white-collar jobs, and the ability to vote—laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.

Over half of all Black children in America are subjected to at least one child protection probe before turning eighteen. They are 2.4 times more likely than whites to be permanently separated from their parents, entering a foster care population of more than 427,000 children nationally. So prevalent is the view that Black parents are being criminalized—many of them mothers like Chanel—that advocates have nicknamed this practice Jane Crow.

Jason also wants Dasani to think about her role, and how she could have handled the conflict differently. “What do you mean?” she asks. “Be fake?” “Fake” is a word that Dasani uses all the time. Politeness is “fake” if it hides a person’s true feelings. Restraint is also “fake,” whereas giving someone the middle finger is “real.” Dasani will only be real. She is fond of saying, “This is who I am. Love me or hate me.” As Jason listens, he has a revelation. Dasani loves to blast other people for being “fake.” But this time, she is talking about herself. She is arguing that to follow Hershey’s rules of conduct is to be “fake.” Jason looks at her. “Do you know what code-switching is?” he asks.

Put another way: More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark conference concluded that America’s homes “should not be broken up for reasons of poverty,” the federal government is giving ten times as much money to programs that separate families (most of them poor) as to programs that might preserve them.

No matter what Dasani says, the fact remains that she has frightened her housemates. Whenever a student causes others to feel unsafe, that student must be mentally evaluated. Dasani will spend the night at the school’s health clinic. The Akerses explain this to Dasani. She looks numb.

Yet for Dasani, “home” is more than a place. “Home is the people. The people I hang out with. The people I grew up with. That, to be honest, is really home. Family who have had my back since day one. It doesn’t have to be a roof over my head….At Hershey, I feel like a stranger. Like I don’t really belong. In New York, I feel proud. I feel good. I feel accepted when I’m in New York.”

“Help me understand why you can’t walk away,” she asks. Dasani is tired of this question. She grew up on the streets. Her instinct is to protect herself. She has explained this to Tara many times. “If someone walked up to your daughter and punched your daughter in the face,” Dasani says, “what you gonna tell your daughter to do?” “Tell the teacher,” Tara replies. “See, I’m not like that,” Dasani says. “I’m gonna hit her back.” She knows that she sounds like her mother right now. But when it comes to fighting, Dasani trusts her mother: To protect yourself, Chanel says, is to protect your reputation. And just because Dasani left Brooklyn does not mean she has lost her “street cred,” which she must “defend.” Tara mounts her best counterargument regarding how to “defend” one’s street cred: “You end up being the bigger defender by walking away.”

To change Dasani’s behavior, the team at Hershey must identify her triggers—any thoughts, words, or actions that cause her to lose control. It does not help that Dasani hates the word “trigger,” which makes her think of gunfire. The word is, in and of itself, a trigger. It disrupts the peace of Hershey, where “you don’t hear no gunshots.” It takes Dasani back to Brooklyn’s streets. Yet in both places, her “trigger” is the same. Don’t disrespect me and you won’t feel my fire.

Angry mothers often call, for reasons as varied as their suffering. They have lost a job. They have relapsed. They have gone to jail, or come out of it. They have been evicted. They have landed in the hospital. They have run out of food stamps. They are having another baby. Any one of these events can make a mother pine for her missing child—especially if that child is the oldest, the strongest, the one capable enough to have left in the first place.

Papa reports to his psychological evaluation “in a pleasant mood, saying hello and smiling,” writes the clinician. The boy is asked to make some art. He loves to draw, setting about the task with great energy. Yet his renderings are described as “impulsively” made, “sketchy,” and “poorly drawn with gross distortions.” One of Papa’s drawings is of a person, the therapist writes, “with disproportioned facial features, outstretched wing like arms, with limbs that are uneven in length and thickness. The large head is resting on the torso without a neck.” The person’s mouth is open, and decorated with what the therapist believes to be a “grate like covering.” “This is bizarre in nature and may reflect some psychotic process,” concludes the therapist.

Nowhere in the report is Papa’s drawing explained by him. He has drawn this image again and again—a crayon version of his father. The boy renders Supreme proudly, to look like his name, with a head large enough to hold a great brain. His mouth is usually open, and covered in what might look like a grate to an outsider. But to Papa, this is clearly a depiction of Supreme’s gold teeth—the “grills” that resemble braces—his most prized possession. The portrait is one of dignity, not psychosis.

Dasani knows that her exit from Hershey will be seen as self-sabotage, as a form of educational suicide. But for Dasani, succeeding at Hershey required another kind of death. It meant losing, even killing off, a basic part of herself. “It was like they wanted you to be someone that you wasn’t,” she says. “If I talk the way I naturally talk—to them—like, something’s wrong with me.” She looks out the window, passing trees and barns and cows.

One in five American children was living in poverty—the same rate as twenty years earlier, when Kotlowitz published his book. In fact, the United States had, in 2012, the highest child poverty rate of any wealthy country after Romania.

The word “understand” comes from Old English—understandan. Literally, it means “to stand in the midst of.” It does not mean we have reached some ultimate truth.

It is also true that whatever power came from being in the Times was no match for the power of poverty in Dasani’s life. If my editors and I were struck by anything, it was that so little actually changed.