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

by Andrea Elliott

There are three ways to be popular, in Chanel’s estimation. Dress fly. Do good in school. Or fight.

Proper discipline is a form of control. The unruly child grows up to join a gang or land in prison, which is just someone else’s system of control.

The blank fires and she is off, ahead of the pack. Win, Dasani tells herself. At the first bend, she trips and falls behind. By the second turn, Dasani has caught up with the lead runner. “Run, Dasani!” Chanel screams. “RUN!”

“I been trying to keep them in. But every time I keep them in, somebody come and say something and they come out,” Dasani says. “Cuz I’m tiny, they think I got no words. I have words.”

When I take off my uniform, Will I be safe from harm— Or will you do me As the Germans did the Jews?

Her mother had “expired,” Chanel recalled the doctor saying, as if she was “a piece of meat gone bad.”

Maslow’s hierarchy is often taught as a pyramid. At its base are the things needed for survival: air, food, water, shelter, clothing, and sleep. Without these things, a person struggles to rise to the next level: “physical safety.” After that comes “belongingness and love,” satisfied by friends and family. Then comes “esteem,” which allows for self-respect and the respect of others. Finally, at the top of the pyramid is “self-actualization”—the ability to reach one’s full potential, to be moral, to lead a life of purpose. One cannot reach the top of the pyramid without possessing the things at its base.

The city flashes in the distance. Dasani is almost home. The calendar says she has been gone from January 26 to April 1—a total of sixty-five days. Yet time cannot always be measured this way. It is less a number of days than a series of lost moments. Lee-Lee may have new words, and Papa new teeth. Will they forgive Dasani for being gone?

It is like opening a letter after a tornado has flattened her house and reading that she needs a new roof.

She never has proper boots. When it snows, she tries to step in the footprints of other people to keep her feet from getting wet. “Poor people don’t want a white Christmas,” she says.