People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. Come on, says her mother, Chanel, who stands next to Dasani. She made leaps ahead in math. You have to be from a low income family. And I met Dasani right in that period, as did the principal. Only together have they learned to navigate povertys systems ones with names suggesting help. This family is a proud family. 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. There are parts of it that are painful. And There Are No Children Here, which takes place in what's called Henry Horner Homes, which is in the west side of Chicago right by what is now called the United Center, which is where the Bulls play. Elliott spent CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, we move to New York. How long is she in that shelter? This harsh routine gives Auburn the feel of a rootless, transient place. So I work very closely with audio and video tools. Try to explain your work as much as you can." And for most of us, I would say, family is so important. And that carries a huge ethical quandary because you don't know, "Will they come to regret this later on?" Chris Hayes speaks with Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott about her book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City., Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City. You know, she just knew this other world was there and it existed and it did not include her. Her skyline is filled with luxury towers, the beacons of a new gilded age. But I know that I tried very, very hard at every step to make sure it felt as authentic as possible to her, because there's a lot of descriptions of how she's thinking about things. Right? Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New Webwhat kind of cancer did nancy kulp have; nickname for someone with a short attention span; costa rican spanish accent; nitric acid and potassium hydroxide exothermic or endothermic Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. No. 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. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. 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 that didn't go over well because he just came (LAUGH) years ago from Egypt. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. . They felt that they had a better handle on my process by then. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. We burn them! Dasani says with none of the tenderness reserved for her turtle. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. (LAUGH) Like those kinds of, like, cheap colognes. Chris Hayes: I want to, sort of, take a step back because I want to continue with what you talk about as, sort of, these forces and the disintegration of the family and also track through where Dasani goes from where she was when she's 11. In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in She wakes to the sound of breathing. This family is a family that prides itself on so many things about its system as a family, including its orderliness. And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. And she talked about them brutally. Her name was Dasani. And I could never see what the next turn would be. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" 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.. What's interesting about that compared to Dasani, just in terms of what, sort of, concentrated poverty is like in the 1980s, I think, when that book is being reported in her is that proximity question. And that was stunning to me. The pounding of fists. There's so much upheaval. Right? The 10-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. Public assistance. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. Andrea Elliott: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. But I think she just experienced such an identity crisis and she felt so much guilt. I think that what is so striking about the New York that she was growing up in, as compared to, for instance, the New York of her mother Chanel, also named for a bottle of liquid, (LAUGH) is that Chanel grew up in East Brooklyn at a time when this was a siloed community, much like what you are describing about Henry Horner. You know, my fridge was always gonna be stocked. The difference is in resources. Andrea has now written a book about Dasani. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. 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. Whether they are riding the bus, switching trains, climbing steps or jumping puddles, they always move as one. It's helping them all get through college. Even Dasanis name speaks of a certain reach. 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. Invisible Child: Dasanis Homeless Life. So her principal, kind of, took her under her wing. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. Their fleeting triumphs and deepest sorrows are, in Dasanis words, my heart. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the PALS Plus NJ OverDrive Library digital collection. Dasani squints to check the date. She was often tired. First of all, Dasani landed there in 2010 because her family had been forced out of their section eight rental in Staten Island. She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. And this was all very familiar to me. And I had avoided it. Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. Every inch of the room is claimed. It's, first of all, the trust, which continues to exist and is something I think people should support. She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise. Where do you first encounter her in the city? And yet, in cities, the fracturing happens within really close range. She actually did a whole newscast for me, which I videotaped, about Barack Obama becoming the first Black president. 6. 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. And about 2,000 kids go there. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequalitytold through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Andrea Elliott: I didn't really have a beat. She will focus in class and mind her manners in the schoolyard. The people I hang out with. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. So at the time, you know, I was at The New York Times and we wrestled with this a lot. WebInvisible Child, highlights the life struggles of eleven-year-old Dasani Coates, a homeless child living with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Dasanis room was where they put the crazies, she says, citing as proof the broken intercom on the wall. 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. Now the bottle must be heated. Section eight, of course, is the federal rental voucher system for low income people to be able to afford housing. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. Chanel was raised on the streets and relied on family bonds, the reporter learned. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. 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. The movies." Web2 In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. Different noises mean different things. And they act as their surrogate parents. She had a lot of issues. They have yet to stir. 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. Its stately neo-Georgian exterior dates back nearly a century, to when the building opened as a public hospital serving the poor. She was unemployed. This focus on language, this focus on speaking a certain way and dressing a certain way made her feel like her own family culture home was being rejected. Her mother, Chanel Sykes, went as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh to escape the influence of a crack-addicted parent. Andrea Elliott: So at the end of the five days that it took for me to read the book to Dasani, when we got to the last line, she said, "That's the last line?" And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. 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. Mice scurry across the floor. 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 Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." You never know with a book what its ultimate life will be in the minds of the people that you write about or a story for that matter. (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. And then they tried to assert control. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it. She could go anywhere. In 2013, the story of a young girl named Dasani Coates took up five front pages in The New York Times. She said, "Home is the people. Well, if you know the poor, you know that they're working all the time. Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. And he immediately got it. And it is something that I think about a lot, obviously, because I'm a practitioner as well. Chris Hayes: Yeah. How you get out isn't the point. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. They have learned to sleep through anything. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. She would change her diaper. This is a story." So that's continued to be the case since the book ended. And I said, "Yes." 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. Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Andrea Elliott. And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. And my process involved them. 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. But I met her standing outside of that shelter. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. And that was a new thing for me. Her parents were struggling with a host of problems. Dasani feels her way across the room that she calls the house a 520 sq ft space containing her family and all their possessions. She doesn't want to have to leave. So Chanel is in Bed-Stuy. It is a private landmark the very place where her beloved grandmother Joanie Sykes was born, back when this was Cumberland Hospital.
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