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Dasani can count the white people he knows on all fours: a court-appointed lawyer, a sidewalk preacher, a nun activist, and a computer science teacher. From time to time a social worker, a beating cop or a city inspector are added to their ranks.
White people fall into two categories: those who are paid to watch Dasani’s family and those who are called to help. Sometimes the same people wear both hats. Their family rarely believes. They appear in Dasani’s life because of the work they do. And on the afternoon of October 4, 2012, this small circle expanded to include me, a full-time writer at The New York Times.
I stand in front of the Auburn shelter and try to talk to homeless mothers. For days I have been looking for a way to this shelter, which is strictly forbidden to the public and the press. They say the conditions are bleak. A legendary local nun, Sister Georgiana Glose, had told me that a family of ten was crammed into a room.
Mothers look at me from top to bottom. I wear the jeans of every street reporter – which, it turns out, can also be the clothes of a social worker or, worse, a whistleblower. Everyone outside is trying to fit in.
“You need to talk to her,” said one mother, pointing to a large freckled woman walking like a sergeant, led by seven children.
Chanel stops on her way and looks at me without blinking (forceful movement, she explains later). I introduce myself, hand her my card. She sees that I am not a whistleblower, she will admit later because I wear a flexible, loose-fitting wool hat and keep dropping my pen. I’m too conspicuous to be in the drug department.
We will meet soon in the nearby parks, my notebook is filled with the life story of Chanel. And yet, every few lines I scribble, another voice interrupts – the energetic eleven-year-old daughter next to Chanel.
Over and over again, Dasani catches my eye – making wheels and turns, rebuilding her last battle with Auburn’s incorrigible mice. For all his sense, Dasani is an attentive listener. She absorbs the facts of my life as if she were holding her own dictaphone: that I am a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two little girls; that I work for the Times investigation team; that I take train 2 from the Upper West Side, sipping green juice, which makes Dasani stick out his tongue as if closing his mouth.
Each discovery opens up new lines of research. She wants to know why I speak on the phone in Spanish (my mother is a Chilean immigrant). She wants to know my sign (Sagittarius) and my favorite musician (Prince). She wants to know how far I’ve traveled (I’m showing her a story from a magazine I wrote from the slums of northern Morocco).
Dasani and Chanel have no reason to trust me. Eventually, Chanel will admit that if I hadn’t been a mother, she would never have let me in with her children. It also helps that I’m not, in her words, “completely white” because I’m “Latin.” My ethnicity pleases Dasani, whose biological father is half Dominican. But for Chanel, race is more important. At best, I am a white Latin American with a degree, which makes me a beneficiary of a privilege that she will respect and analyze for years to come.
My only other saving grace is the digital pen I use to record sound, which Dasani calls my “spy pen.” In fact, her family wants me to spy on Auburn. That’s why I need their help. The shelter is heavily guarded, which means I have to report from the outside. So I ask them to document the condition of their room with video cameras provided by the Times. We also give Chanel a mobile phone to ensure stable communication, as Supreme always runs out of minutes on its Lifeline phone (provided free of charge by the federal government).
I soon stare at shots of mice, cockroaches and mold on the walls. Auburn’s breakup is no secret to city and state inspectors, who have quoted Dasani’s room for thirteen violations – including lead paint – since her family moved in. Elected officials and city administrators have also known about the shelter’s problems for years, pursued by Fort Greene SNAP, the local non-profit organization run by Sister Georgiana.
When Auburn staff visit Room 449, they seem more eager to argue than to help. They focus on the family’s transgressions, finding the room “chaotic” and not clean enough. They pay little attention to Auburn’s obvious shortcomings – the lack of privacy dividers, the presence of pests.
Recently, Auburn has failed to repair the family sink. It drips and drips all night, keeping Dasani awake. She knows her mother asked the staff to fix it.
In the end, Dasani likes it. She squatted to examine the tube.
“No one thought to push it and twist it,” she said. A few quick punches and she triumphed. Her siblings are screaming.
It is not noted that here, in a shelter with a budget of 9 million dollars, managed by an agency with more than a hundred times more funds, the plumbing fell on an eleven-year-old girl.
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