She calls him Daddy. 4 Dasani blinks, looking out at 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." This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. Random House, 2021. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. How long is she in that shelter? In the book, the major turning points are, first of all, where the series began, that she was in this absolutely horrifying shelter just trying to survive. Dasani's family of ten lives in one room of the Auburn Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. So let's start with what was your beat at the time when you wrote the first story? It is a private landmark the very place where her beloved grandmother Joanie Sykes was born, back when this was Cumberland Hospital. And they were, kind of, swanky. She's pregnant with Dasani, 2001. The thumb-suckers first: six-year-old Hada and seven-year-old Maya, who share a small mattress. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. Dasani slips down three flights of stairs, passing a fire escape where drugs and weapons are smuggled in. It's something that I talked about a lot with Supreme and Chanel. There were evictions. The west side of Chicago is predominantly Black and Latino and very poor. And she would stare at the Empire State Building at the tower lights because the Empire State Building, as any New Yorker knows, lights up depending on the occasion to reflect the colors of that occasion. 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. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. I would be off in the woods somewhere writing and I would call her. The popping of gunshots. And there's some poverty reporting where, like, it feels, you know, a little gross or it feels a little, like, you know, alien gaze-y (LAUGH) for lack of a better word. 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. Anyway, and I said, "Imagine I'm making a movie about your life. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. We break their necks. She could go anywhere. And her principal had this idea that she should apply to a school that I had never heard of called the Milton Hershey School, which is a school in Hershey, Pennsylvania that tries to reform poor children. And it's a little bit like her own mother had thought. This is an extract from Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott (Hutchinson Heinemann, 16.99). Sometimes it'll say, like, "Happy birthday, Jay Z," or, you know. Hershey likes to say that it wants to be the opposite of a legacy school, that if your kids qualify, that means that the school hasn't done its job, 'cause its whole purpose is to lift children out of poverty. For a time, she thrived there. Clothing donations. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. She's at a community college. If she cries, others answer. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone. And this is a current that runs through this family, very much so, as you can see by the names. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. It's unpredictable. She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. And the reporter who wrote that, Andrea Elliott, wrote a series of stories about Dasani. They have yet to stir. We rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable. That, to be honest, is really home. Taped to the wall is the childrens proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. Family was everything for them. And he didn't really understand what my purpose was. She wakes to the sound of breathing. Andrea joins to talk about her expanded coverage of the Coates family story, which is told in her new book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City.. Shes In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lees formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. Serena McMahonadapted it for the web. Andrea Elliott: I met Dasani while I was standing outside of Auburn Family Residence, which is a city run, decrepit shelter, one of two city run shelters that were notorious for the conditions that children were forced to live in with their families. (LAUGH) I don't know what got lost in translation there. She lives in a house run by a married couple. She felt that they were trying to make her, sort of, get rid of an essential part of herself that she was proud of. They did go through plenty of cycles of trying to fix themselves. So she knows what it's like to suddenly be the subject of a lot of people's attention. (LAUGH) You know? We often focus on the stories of children who make it out of tumultuous environments. She is a child of New York City. It was a constant struggle. And, you know, I think that there's, in the prose itself, tremendous, you know, I think, sort of, ethical clarity and empathy and humanization. She would help in all kinds of ways. In one part of the series, journalist Andrea Elliott contrasts the struggle of Dasanis ten member family living at a decrepit shelter to the gentrification and wealth on the other side of Fort She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise. 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. And it's the richest private school in America. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. Andrea Elliott: Okay. 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. She would then start to feed the baby. They're quite spatially separated from it. And it is something that I think about a lot, obviously, because I'm a practitioner as well. Whether they are riding the bus, switching trains, climbing steps or jumping puddles, they always move as one. But I would say that at the time, the parents saw that trust as an obstacle to any kind of real improvement because they couldn't access it because donors didn't want money going into the hands of parents with a drug history and also because they did continue to receive public assistance. We take the sticks and smash they eyes out! And he immediately got it. And a lot of that time was spent together. So that's continued to be the case since the book ended. And I think showing the dignity within these conditions is part of that other lens. (LAUGH) Like those kinds of, like, cheap colognes. Just steps away are two housing projects and, tucked among them, a city-run homeless shelter where the heat is off and the food is spoiled. Born at She was an amazing ethnographer and she and I had many conversations about what she called the asymmetry of power, that is this natural asymmetry that's built into any academic subject, reporter subject relationship. You know? Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. he wakes to the sound of breathing. And it also made her indispensable to her parents, which this was a real tension from the very beginning. She was invited to be a part of Bill de Blasio's inaugural ceremony. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. There's so much upheaval. We burn them! Dasani says with none of the tenderness reserved for her turtle. And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. 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. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. She likes being small because I can slip through things. She imagines herself with supergirl powers. How you get out isn't the point. And part of the reason I think that is important is because the nature of the fracturing (LAUGH) of American society is such that as we become increasingly balkanized, there's a kind of spacial separation that happens along class lines. Every morning, Dasani leaves her grandmothers birthplace to wander the same streets where Joanie grew up, playing double Dutch in the same parks, seeking shade in the same library. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. The children are ultimately placed in foster care, and Dasani blames herself for it. No, I know. The turtle they had snuck into the shelter. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. The problems of poverty are so much greater, so much more overwhelming than the power of being on the front page of The New York Times. And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. Like, these two things that I think we tend to associate with poverty and, particularly, homelessness, which is mental illness and substance abuse, which I think get--, Chris Hayes: --very much, particularly in the way that in an urban environment, get codified in your head of, like, people who were out and, you know, they're dealing with those two issues and this is concentrated. But every once in a while, when by some miracle she scores a pair of Michael Jordans, she finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: she wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. Andrea, thank you so much. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. And they were things that I talked about with the family a lot. And this was all very familiar to me. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter, Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here. And one thing I found really interesting about your introduction, which so summarizes the reason I feel that this story matters, is this fracturing of America. I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. And I found greater clarity after I left the newsroom and was more in an academic setting as I was researching this book. She was unemployed. After that, about six months after the series ran, I continued to follow them all throughout. 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 has hit a major milestone, though. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. But the spacial separation of Chicago means that they're not really cheek and jowl next to, you know, $3 million town homes or anything like that. And I'm also, by the way, donating a portion of the proceeds of this book to the family, to benefit Dasani and her siblings and parents. And, of course, children aren't the face of the homeless. WebRT @usaunify: When Dasani Left Home. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. Right? We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and She was doing so well. 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. Yes. So at the time, you know, I was at The New York Times and we wrestled with this a lot. I think she feels that the book was able to go to much deeper places and that that's a good thing. Her husband also had a drug history. So she lived in that shelter for over three years. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. On one side are the children, on the other the rodents their carcasses numbering up to a dozen per week. Parental neglect, failure to provide necessities for ones children like shelter or clothing, is one form of child maltreatment that differs from child abuse, she says. By the time, I would say, a lot of school kids were waking up, just waking up in New York City to go to school, Dasani had been working for 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.. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named after a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. The 10-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. This is an extract You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. She's seeing all of this is just starting to happen. Why Is This Happening? I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. Their voucher had expired. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. This harsh routine gives Auburn the feel of a rootless, transient place. They loved this pen and they would grab it from me (LAUGH) and they would use it as a microphone and pretend, you know, she was on the news. Dasani feels her way across the room that she calls the house a 520 sq ft space containing her family and all their possessions. I still am always. I mean, these were people with tremendous potential and incredible ideas about what their lives could be that were such a contrast to what they were living out. It's a really, really great piece of work. Child Protection Services showed up on 12 occasions. And so I have seen my siblings struggle for decades with it and have periods of sobriety and then relapse. It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. And, of course, the obvious thing that many people at the time noted was that, you know, there were over a million people in bondage at the same time they were saying this. Public assistance. They dwell within Dasani wherever she goes. And she was actually living in the very building where her own grandmother had been born back when it was Cumberland Hospital, which was a public hospital. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your subjective perspective and your experience as this observer and the ethical complications (LAUGH) of that and talk a little bit about how you dealt with that right after we take this quick break. I live in Harlem. And there was a lot of complicated feelings about that book, as you might imagine. Her siblings, she was informed, were placed in foster care. In New York, I feel proud. In 2019, when the school bell rang at the end of the day, more than 100,000 schoolchildren in New York City had no permanent home to return to. Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows reportedly was the longest ever published in the newspaper up to that time. We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. And regardless of our skin color, our ethnicity, our nationality, our political belief system, if you're a journalist, you're gonna cross boundaries. We see a story of a girl who's trying to not escape, she says. I had not ever written a book. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. And she talked about them brutally. So this was the enemy. Journalist Andrea Elliott followed a homeless child named Dasani for almost a decade, as she navigated family trauma and a system stacked against her. Almost half of New Yorks 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line. And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. Dasani was growing up at a time where, you know, the street was in some ways dangerous depending on what part of Brooklyn you are, but very, very quickly could become exciting. And, as she put it, "It makes me feel like something's going on out there." It's why do so many not? There are a lot of different gradations of what that poverty looks like. Entire neighbourhoods would be remade, their families displaced, their businesses shuttered, their histories erased by a gentrification so vast and meteoric that no brand of bottled water could have signalled it. Chris Hayes: Dasani is 11 years old. And we can talk about that more. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? Well, by the way, that really gets in the way of getting a job. I can read you the quote. Mice scurry across the floor. IE 11 is not supported. I mean, that is one of many issues. "This is so and so." 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. You have to be from a low income family. Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. And I had read it in high school. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. And a lot of the reporting was, "But tell me how you reacted to this. But when you remove her from the family system, this was predictable that the family would struggle, because she was so essential to that. This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. All she has to do is climb the school steps. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. Their sister is always first. And it was an extraordinary experience. Even Dasanis name speaks of a certain reach. Today, Dasani lives surrounded by wealth, whether she is peering into the boho chic shops near her shelter or surfing the internet on Auburns shared computer. Theres nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the U.S. About one in 12 live in New York City. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. Right outside is a communal bathroom with a large industrial tub. There are several things that are important to know about this neighborhood and what it represents. This is where she derives her greatest strength. Over the next year, 911 dispatchers will take some 350 calls from Auburn, logging 24 reports of assault, four reports of child abuse, and one report of rape. Hidden in a box is Dasanis pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. And they agreed to allow me to write a book and to continue to stay in their lives. They think, "All men are created equal," creed is what distinguishes the U.S., what gives it its, sort of, moral force and righteousness in rebelling against the crown. 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. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. So it was strange to her. And so they had a choice. She will kick them awake. Chapter 1. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. (LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. On a good day, Dasani walks like she is tall, her chin held high. She's transient." A movie has characters." You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. She doesn't want to get out. I still have it. She spent eight years falling the story of Dasani Coates. The other thing you asked about were the major turning points. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. You know, we're very much in one another's lives. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. You are seeing the other. And a few years back, there was this piece about a single girl in the New York City public school system in The New York Times that was really I think brought people up shore, 'cause it was so well done. Web2 In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl. You get birthday presents. And she became, for a moment, I wouldn't say celebrity, but a child who was being celebrated widely. It's, first of all, the trust, which continues to exist and is something I think people should support. The other thing I would say is that we love the story of the kid who made it out. And so I also will say that people would look at Dasani's family from the outside, her parents, and they might write them off as, you know, folks with a criminal record. And then I wanted to find a target in New York, a good focal point in New York. Family wasn't an accident. I feel accepted.". Dasani's 20. Dasani hugs her mother Chanel, with her sister Nana on the left, 2013. o know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. Either give up your public assistance and you can have this money or not. 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. All rights reserved. She was a single mother. She is among 432 homeless children and parents living at Auburn. And at first, she thrived. I think that that was a major compass for me was this idea that, "Don't ever get too comfortable that you know your position here or your place. People who have had my back since day one. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the PALS Plus NJ OverDrive Library digital collection. April 17, 2014 987 words. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. And those questions just remained constantly on my mind. If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. She's been through this a little bit before, right, with the series. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. And, you know, this was a new school. It's something that I have wrestled with from the very beginning and continue to throughout. And this book really avoids it. They are true New Yorkers. 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. There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. I think it's so natural for an outsider to be shocked by the kind of conditions that Dasani was living in. It's painful. It was incredibly confusing as a human being to go from their world back into mine on the Upper West Side in my rental with my kids who didn't have to worry about roaches. And so I did what I often do as a journalist is I thought, "You know, let me find a universal point of connection. One in five kids. The material reality of Dasani's life her homelessness, her family's lack of money is merely the point of departure for understanding her human condition, she says. Like, these are--. ", I think if we look at Dasani's trajectory, we see a different kind of story. I was comfortable with that as a general notion of what I should be doing with my work, because I think that is our job as journalists. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. We suffocate them with the salt!. And then, of course, over time, what happens in the United States is that we become less and less materially equal. She is in that shelter because of this, kind of, accumulation of, you know, small, fairly common, or banal problems of the poor that had assembled into a catastrophe, had meant not being able to stay in the section eight housing. 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 were put in a situation where things were out of their control. 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. INVISIBLE CHILD POVERTY, SURVIVAL & HOPE IN AN AMERICAN CITY. Elliott says those are the types of stories society tends to glorify because it allows us to say, if you work hard enough, if you are gifted enough, then you can beat this.. She will tell them to shut up. And to her, that means doing both things keeping her family in her life while also taking strides forward, the journalist says. The people I hang out with. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. What was striking to me was how little changed. She has a full wardrobe provided to her. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. 'Cause I think it's such an important point. Slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. The people I grew up with. She never even went inside. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. I mean, whether you're poor--, Andrea Elliott: --or you're wealthy, (LAUGH) like, you know.
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