In the far-distant year of 2013, when the New York Times‘s paywall wasn’t as sturdy as it is today, I, like millions of others, was gripped by a story about a homeless girl in New York City. Dasani was smart, she was articulate, she was fiercely protective of her loving but dysfunctional family, and she was encumbered by impossible circumstances far beyond her control. I’ve wondered a lot over the years about what happened to Dasani.
Ten years later, journalist Andrea Elliot has the cure in Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, a book about Dasani and her family that spends over five hundred pages telling us about just that.
When we meet Dasani, she is an eleven-year-old girl already taking a large role in raising her seven siblings as the family crowds into a single room in a homeless shelter. Her parents, Chanel and Supreme, are a loving anchor for the large family, but their struggles with poverty and substance abuse mean they’re not as reliable as the children need. Luckily, Dasani knows just what the kids need, from her just-younger sister Avianna all the way down to their infant sister, Lee-Lee. Dasani is also sharp in the classroom. While her hot temper keeps landing her in trouble at school, she shows enough promise that her teachers and principal look for ways to get her a leg up and out of generational poverty.
The Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school for troubled but promising kids established by the same Milton Hershey that invented the Hershey’s chocolate bar, seems like a shining opportunity for Dasani, even if it is a long shot—just ten percent of applicants are accepted to the exclusive school. Dasani beats the odds and leaves her native New York City for Pennsylvania, but the separation from her family is excruciating. Dasani has a shot at a new life, a better life, but thoughts and regrets from her old one might stand in the way.
Many of the events Elliot depicted or summarized in her series of articles about Dasani are present in Invisible Child. However, rather than rehashing that original reporting, Invisible Child feels at times like a behind-the-scenes look at what went into that original reporting, and, at others, a continuation of it. The continuation is, by and large, grim, as the family would seemingly keep taking one step forward and two steps back: “The children are doing well in school! The family finally got a housing voucher! The voucher is for Staten Island, not Brooklyn, so everyone has to move boroughs, and now the children are all doing poorly in their new schools.” The complexity of the system this family has to navigate, and the myriad cracks in it, would be tough for anyone to navigate, let alone people who’ve had the deck stacked against them their entire lives.
It’s difficult to read any of Dasani’s family, and five hundred pages of it would be overwhelming if not for two crucial components of Invisible Child (or, of Elliot’s reporting of Dasani as a whole). First, while Elliot points out massive inequities, historical injustices, and glaring hypocrisy as is relevant to the story, she wisely avoids sensationalizing and judgement—or minimization of behavior or events. She is present in the story, but her personal pronoun only pops up occasionally, leading to her feeling like an omniscient presence observing all as she, and robust documentation, sees it. Secondly, the family’s obvious and overwhelming love for each other. Things are bad, and get worse. The children are failed time and time again by the system and their parents, who themselves have been failed time and time again by the system and their parents, and on and on. The love, though—they’ve got that right, and that helps them stick together, even, and perhaps especially, when doing so makes life more difficult.
This is not to say that it’s easy to read about children being abused and neglected, or about prevalent drug use, or the conditions in shelters that are only tolerable because the shelters beat the alternative. Invisible Child, though, was never meant to be easy reading. It shouldn’t be easy to get this kind of insight into the kind of life millions of Americans face. It shouldn’t be easy to confront the questions we’d rather ignore in favor of blaming personal frailties of those experiencing it. Nothing about this is easy, but it is compelling and enlightening to a reality that remains a distressing fiction for most.
Ring Reads 