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

by Andrea Elliott

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

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.

Contrary to New York City’s image as a progressive beacon, it was a Manhattan-born minstrel named Thomas Dartmouth Rice who in the 1830s invented the slave caricature Jim Crow—a mockery, performed in blackface, that came to personify segregation.

Racial tensions had long been simmering when, in 1863, Irish immigrants in Manhattan mounted one of the most violent anti-Black insurrections in American history. Angered by a law drafting them to fight in the Civil War—ostensibly to free slaves who might then take their jobs—rioters filled the streets, lynching Black people and burning down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue as 233 children escaped out the back.

Dr. Susan S. McKinney, who in 1870 became the first female African American doctor in New York State, and the third in the nation.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement, consider that Dr. McKinney went to medical school four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as the only Black student in her all-female school. She then graduated as valedictorian. When Dr. McKinney died in 1918, W.E.B. Du Bois gave the eulogy at her funeral.

Dr. McKinney’s former brownstone at 205 DeKalb Avenue—the site of her thriving medical practice—

Instead, the names of Brooklyn’s slave-holding families dominate the terrain. Boerum Hill (named for Simon Boerum, a man with three slaves). Wyckoff Street (Peter Wyckoff, enslaver of seven). Ditmas Park (four slaves). Luquer Street (thirteen). Van Brunt Street (seven). Cortelyou Road (two). Both Van Dam and Bayard streets are named for the owners of slave ships, while Stuyvesant Heights is named for the man who governed the New Netherland colony of the Dutch West India Company, which shipped tens of thousands of slaves.

The Sykes surname traces back to a white slave owner whose probable British ancestors came to America, via Virginia, by the early 1700s. A century later, that man—Kedar Sykes—had purchased a slave in Duplin County, North Carolina, creating in 1813 what may be the first record of Dasani’s own ancestors. By 1835, the Sykes estate’s documented “property” included six slaves. Among them was a little boy, around age five, whose name was David. He was valued at $100.

Langston Hughes’s poem, “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?”: When I take off my uniform, Will I be safe from harm— Or will you do me As the Germans did the Jews?

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.

Labor unions tended to exclude Black workers. For veterans with high-skill training, this was an especially bitter fate. Carpenters became dishwashers. Electrical aides worked as porters. Mechanics turned into janitors.

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.

“A riot,” in King’s words, “is the language of the unheard.”

In 1986—the same year that Chanel discovered her mother’s crack pipe—Congress approved a new law making punishment for crack possession (common among the poor) one hundred times more harsh than for powder cocaine (common among the wealthy). Even first-time crack offenders landed mandatory minimum sentences of five to ten years, contributing to the explosion of America’s prison population—a disproportionately Black and Latino group that came to include Chanel’s two brothers, an uncle, and four cousins. Within a decade, this population would surpass a million. The United States had claimed the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Breukelen Houses (which took its name from the Dutch enslavers who in 1645 settled the land that would become Brooklyn).

Society’s answer to poverty, time and again, was to separate children from their families.

“That’s the most important part for the children—is my presence,” says Supreme. “That’s what they took away. My presence.”

To write about a child is to reckon with other childhoods—the ones that formed Dasani’s parents, the childhoods that still live inside them. Society does not see Chanel and Supreme as former children, which makes it easier to blame them for their problems.