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

by Andrea Elliott

Children are not the face of New York’s homeless. They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets, and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter.

Charters are known to exclude children with learning disabilities or behavioral issues.

They win their spot by lottery, which requires the help of an adult—one with a reliable email account or at least a cellphone that doesn’t shut off.

Teachers are the happiest adults that Dasani knows. When asked “What will you be when you grow up?” she and her siblings all say the same thing: “A teacher.”

“How can I pull up any straps with no boots?” she says.

They talk of wanting real jobs, but many things get in the way—their criminal records, their periodic relapses, their daily attendance at the drug treatment clinics upon which custody of their children rests.

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

On test days, she brings bagels, hard-boiled eggs, and yogurt, beating back her students’ hunger so they perform well enough.

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.

She cannot speak. To be suspended is to be truly homeless.

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.

They fantasized about having many children—“one full family,” to heal a history of broken homes.

Nothing counts like the people who show up.

Chanel can’t recall the last time they were so happy. She fishes through her pockets, handing the ventriloquist her last two dollars before exiting at Sherry’s stop.

It is harder for Dasani to see the person she might become. She has been told she must reach for college if she wants a life of choices, but who will pay?

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.”

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.

Long after they leave, Giant is still fuming. Can this even work? “You’re fixing a child to send back to broken parents,” he tells me.

Two-thirds of all children living in city shelters are chronically absent. But she also suspects that Chanel is keeping the girls home from school. Today, a teacher heard one of the sisters complaining about childcare duties.

Sometimes a child must be angry enough to tell the truth.

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.

Avianna has settled into her desk and is now staring at the teacher, unaware that they are both homeless.

She wants to launch an app called Hood GPS, to spare drivers from the robotic white voices in their cars.

The unspoken message is clear. In order to leave poverty, Dasani must also leave her family—at least for a while.

Caseworkers come and go, with 20 percent quitting ACS after their first year. They often leave due to “burnout,” a condition that is never applied to the children, as if they run on eternal flames.

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.

If you have a big enough why, you can endure almost any how.

When a caseworker asks Khaliq how he wants to “be perceived,” the answer is that it does not matter. Society already sees him as “a thief, a trouble maker, and angry.” “It’s hard,” he tells her, “for a Black youth to get any other perception.”

She feels more protected by the Bloods than by any of the adults paid to look after her—the caseworker, the foster mother, the principal, the school counselor.