Nearly a quarter of her childhood has unfolded at the Auburn Family Residence, where Dasanis family a total of 10 people live in one room. And I'll get to that in a second. 'Invisible Child' tells the story of childhood homelessness The mice used to terrorise Dasani, leaving pellets and bite marks. Now It's why do so many not? Shes not alone. And, you know, this was a new school. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. She could even tell the difference between a cry for hunger and a cry for sleep. She is 20 years old. At that time when I met her when she was 11, Dasani would wake around 5 a.m. and the first thing she did, she always woke before all of her other siblings. And it's a little bit like her own mother had thought. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. The sound of that name. No. WebInvisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? And, really, the difference is, like, the kind of safety nets, the kind of resources, the kind of access people have--. And she also struggled with having to act differently. But you have to understand that in so doing, you carry a great amount of responsibility to, I think, first and foremost, second guess yourself constantly. She had a drug (INAUDIBLE). Her body is still small enough to warm with a hairdryer. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. But it remains the case that a shocking percentage of Americans live below the poverty line. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. Invisible Child Talk a little bit about where Dasani is now, her age, what she had to, sort of, come through, and also maybe a little bit about the fact that she was written about in The New York Times, like, might have affected that trajectory. And just exposure to diversity is great for anyone. It's why do so many not? And her lips are stained with green lollipop. Sept. 28, 2021. "This is so and so." And I understand the reporters who, sort of, just stop there and they describe these conditions and they're so horrifying. St. Patty's Day, green and white. And I hope that she'll continue to feel that way. Dasani keeps forgetting to count the newest child. So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. Dasani, a tiny eleven-year-old girl when the book begins in 2012, has learned the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. And it's not because people didn't care or there wasn't the willpower to help Dasani. What happens when trying to escape poverty means separating from your family at 13? And I pulled off from my shelf this old copy of Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, which is a classic incredible book about two brothers in the Chicago housing projects in the 1980s. Dasani can get lost looking out her window, until the sounds of Auburn interrupt. And even as you move into the 1820s and '30s when you have fights over, sort of, Jacksonian democracy and, kind of, popular sovereignty and will, you're still just talking about essentially white men with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and property rights. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. And we're gonna talk a little bit about what that number is and how good that definition is. And it really was for that clientele, I believe. It's on the west side just west of downtown. Invisible Child Chris Hayes: Yeah. It is also a story that reaches back in time to one Black family making its way through history, from slavery to the Jim Crow South and then the Great Migrations passage north. And as prosperity rose for one group of people, poverty deepened for another, leaving Dasani to grow up true to her name in a novel kind of place. To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare. It is a private landmark the very place where her beloved grandmother Joanie Sykes was born, back when this was Cumberland Hospital. If you use the word homeless, usually the image that comes to mind is of a panhandler or someone sleeping on subway grates. I mean, I think everyone knows there are a lot of poor people, particularly a lot of poor people in urban centers, although there are a lot of poor people in rural areas. And so it would break the rules. Laundry piled up. She is forever in motion, doing backflips at the bus stop, dancing at the welfare office. In the blur of the citys streets, Dasani is just another face. Why Is This Happening? is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and features music by Eddie Cooper. And so Dasani went literally from one day to the next from the north shore of Staten Island where she was living in a neighborhood that was very much divided along the lines of gang warfare. Journalist Andrea Elliott followed a homeless child named Dasani for almost a decade, as she navigated family trauma and a system stacked against her. East New York still is to a certain degree, but Bed-Stuy has completely changed now. Jane Clayson Guest Host, Here & NowJane Clayson is Here & Now's guest host. But because of the nature of how spread out Chicago was, the fact that this was not a moment of gentrification in the way that we think about it now, particularly in the, sort of, post-2000 comeback city era and then the post-financial crisis, that the kids in that story are not really cheek by jowl with all of the, kind of, wealth that is in Chicago. And to each of those, sort of, judgments, Dasani's mother has an answer. with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Her mother had grown up in a very different time. This harsh routine gives Auburn the feel of a rootless, transient place. In New York, I feel proud. The book is called Invisible Child. Like, I would love to meet a woman who's willing to go through childbirth for just a few extra dollars on your food stamp benefits (LAUGH) that's not even gonna last the end of the month." INVISIBLE CHILD | Kirkus Reviews She knows such yearnings will go unanswered. The pounding of fists. I got rice, chicken, macaroni. The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni her siblings - except for Baby Lee-Lee, who is a plump chicken breast. And I had avoided it. She was 11 years old. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener. And so they had a choice. And, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience is like for her. And I just wonder, like, how you thought about it as you went through this project. It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. It's part of the reason I stayed on it for eight years is it just kept surprising me and I kept finding myself (LAUGH) drawn back in. Chapter 42 Now a sophomore, Dasani believes that her family is desperately fractured. Invisible Child And I think showing the dignity within these conditions is part of that other lens. So this was the enemy. She is currently a student at LaGuardia Community College in New York. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. Sometimes she doesnt have to blink. 'Invisible Child' chronicles how homelessness shaped And that's very clear in the context of her parents here. It never works. Child Protection Services showed up on 12 occasions. She actually did a whole newscast for me, which I videotaped, about Barack Obama becoming the first Black president. There's so much upheaval. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. And the more that readers engage with her, the clearer it becomes that every single one of these stories is worthy of attention., After nearly a decade of reporting, Elliott wants readers to remember the girl at her windowsill every morning who believed something better was out there waiting for her.. Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. The citys wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All these things, kind of, coalesced to create a crisis, which is so often the case with being poor is that it's a lot of small things suddenly happening at once that then snowball into something catastrophic. And so I did what I often do as a journalist is I thought, "You know, let me find a universal point of connection. She was the second oldest, but technically, as far as they were all concerned, she was the boss of the siblings and a third parent, in a sense. And you just have to know that going in and never kid yourself that it has shifted. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" 11:12 - And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. And when she left, the family began to struggle, and for a variety of reasons, came under the scrutiny of the city's child protection agency. No, I know. Despite the circumstances, Dasani radiated with potential. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. Dasani gazes out of the window from the one room her family of 10 shared in the Brooklyn homeless shelter where they lived for almost four years. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. And one of the striking elements of the story you tell is that that's not the case in the case of the title character of Dasani. To kill a mouse is to score a triumph. Every inch of the room is claimed. (LAUGH) And the market produces massively too little affordable housing, which is in some ways part of the story of Dasani and her family, which is the city doesn't have enough affordable housing. I was around a lot of folks like Lee Ann Fujii, who passed away. Her expression veers from mischief to wonder. This is So it's interesting how, you know, you always see what's happening on the street first before you see it 10,000 feet above the ground in terms of policy or other things. Life has been anything but easy for 20-year-old Dasani Coates. But nonetheless, my proposal was to focus on Dasani and on her siblings, on children. Family was everything for them. She would change her diaper. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. And it's the richest private school in America. So she knows what it's like to suddenly be the subject of a lot of people's attention. And my process involved them. Her sense of home has always been so profound even though she's homeless. They can screech like alley cats, but no one is listening. Yeah. After Dasanis family left the homeless shelter, she was accepted to the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school for low-income children in Pennsylvania. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. It's told in her newest book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. Criminal justice. She then moved from there to a shelter in Harlem and then to a shelter in the Bronx before finally, once again, landing another section eight voucher and being able to move back into a home with her family. That, to be honest, is really home. And, as she put it, "It makes me feel like something's going on out there." Child protection. One of the first things Dasani will say is that she was running before she walked. WebPULITZER PRIZE WINNER NATIONAL BESTSELLER A vivid and devastating (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girlfrom acclaimed journalist Andrea ElliottFrom its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for I took 14 trips to see her at Hershey. So she would talk about this. At one point, one, I think it was a rat, actually bit baby Lele, the youngest of the children, and left pellets all over the bed. Beyond the shelters walls, in the fall of 2012, Dasani belongs to an invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children the highest number ever recorded, in the most unequal metropolis in America. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. But what about the ones who dont? Ethical issues. Its the point Elliott says she wants to get across in Invisible Child: We need to focus less on escaping problems of poverty and pivot attention to finding the causes and solutions to those problems. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. Then the series ran at the end of 2013. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. Where do you first encounter her in the city? It's, sort of, prismatic because, as you're talking about the separation of a nation in terms of its level of material comfort or discomfort, right, or material want, there's a million different stories to tell of what that looks like. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. She just thought, "Who could afford that?". By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours, Elliott says. And in my local bodega, they suddenly recently added, I just noticed this last night, organic milk. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Then they will head outside, into the bright light of morning. Their voucher had expired. And one of the things that I've learned, of course, and this is an obvious point, is that those are very widely distributed through society. Invisible Child We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and She doesn't want to get out. The light noises bring no harm the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican ladys chihuahuas, the addicts who wander the projects, hitting some crazy high. Her name was Dasani. A stunning debut, the book covers eight formative years in the life of an intelligent and imaginative young girl in a Brooklyn homeless shelter as she balances poverty, family, and opportunity.