A Hope in the Unseen (14 page)

He looks down at it admiringly, neat and perfect. But he can’t relate it to anything; he sees only strange terms in a foreign context.

Only in calculus, his forte, has he managed to stay afloat through relentless effort. At least there he’s more confident and feels comfortable asking questions. And he gets a close look at the top students in the program, especially Andrew Parker, a student from Hawaii who seems
to be part Asian, part black, and partly something else. All anyone knows for sure is that he’s brilliant. Every day in calculus, Cedric finds himself studying Andrew, the way he cocks his head or handles his pen, as though attitude and demeanor might hold clues to his success. It’s as if the instructor, Joseph Leverich, is talking only to Andrew in some secret language.

Sitting at his desk with the door closed as midnight approaches, Cedric mulls whether he can bring himself to do it: to ask Andrew for help. The kid drives half the MITES crazy. He’s so damn cocky, always holding forth. His favorite aphorism is some Asian saying about how “the hungriest lion is not the one at the top of the hill, but the lion just beneath him, who wants to get to the top.” Why is he always saying that, Cedric wonders, if it’s clear to everyone that Andrew’s at the top of the hill?

But it has been a long night of toil, and Cedric feels he’s finally closing in on a real understanding of some new ways to calculate acceleration and velocity. He just needs a nudge forward.

A few minutes later, he spots Andrew walking in the hallway and makes his request. “I really don’t want to be tutoring people, okay Cedric? That’s what the counselors are for,” Andrew says, polite but unyielding. And, maybe thinking of his beloved lions, he adds, “I have to be looking up, not down, beneath me,” and he strolls into the men’s room.

Cedric, alone in the hallway holding his drooping notebook, is ready to explode. He races back to his room and slams the door, his brain burning with the words “beneath me.” “What a thing to say,” he rants, talking to the wall, “like I’m some kind of inferior human being!”

A few nights later, a crowd of students jostles into MacGregor’s lounge for Chinese food, soda, and a rare moment of release from the weekend’s study marathon for midterms. While whispers of romances have been circulating and study groups have more or less crystallized along black or Hispanic lines, this long day of wearying study has left most of the kids hard pressed to remember who’s supposed to hang with whom. Kelly Armendariz busily tries to teach the opening bars of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
to Mark McIntosh on an old piano in the
lounge. Two Hispanic girls are singing a Selena song with a black guy, and, a few feet to their left, on the lounge’s industrial green carpeting, Isa Williams is teaching Micah Mitchell how to click her heels.

The counselors, having once gone through this program already, look on with tight smiles, always watchful. The academic pressure, they know, is intensifying. Midterm exams start tomorrow—along with all-nighters and panic. Some students will grow depressed; others will get sick from exhaustion. The counselors watch closely to see if anyone seems glum, confused, or bent on straying from the group.

Tonight, all the students seem happy and accounted for.

Except one.

Upstairs, Cedric is lying on his bed with the door closed and lights off, waiting for a miracle that will allow him to keep up with the others. He simply can’t work any harder. It’s only 10:30, but exhaustion from weeks of toil has overtaken him. Lying on his back, looking at the ceiling, his forward motion halted, he realizes that there’s only so much he can do. It’s not his fault that he started miles behind where most of the other kids did and he’ll have to run twice their speed to catch them.

Not that this provides him much comfort. He has been cutting back on calls to his mother, not wanting to tell her that things aren’t going so well. Still, he thinks of her often and what she would say: “Don’t get down on yourself, Lavar, you can do anything you set your mind to.”

If she told him that right this second, he thinks he’d definitely respond, “Listen, Ma, it’s not that simple.” He takes the phone card his mother gave him from his wallet, dials a number, and waits a moment.

“Hey, Torrence,” Cedric says, sitting up on the bed. “It’s me, calling from Massachusetts.”

Torrence Parks is one of the Jefferson gang that Cedric checks in with from time to time. He’s now at Woodrow Wilson High School, one of the better D.C. high schools. Since they parted after junior high, Torrence and Cedric have kept in touch by phone. In their last call a few months ago, Torrence said he had recently become an enthusiast of Islam and was spending a lot of time at a local mosque.

Cedric lets on that things aren’t going so well, and Torrence is at
the ready with sweeping explanations from Islamic dogma for Cedric’s unhappiness.

“It’s simple, Cedric. You should stick to your own,” he says. “You’re feeling bad, deep down, because you’re betraying your people, leaving them all behind, by going up to a big white university. Even if you manage to be successful, you’ll never be accepted by whites. You’re just being used by the white power structure to make them feel good, like they’re doing their part and giving a few select Africans a chance.”

Cedric, who usually argues these points, mumbles something unintelligible to let Torrence know he’s listening.

His friend is emboldened. “Look, you may not agree with me, but you have to admit that those kids know how to play the game of white academic success better than you do. And that’s why they’ll get ahead and you won’t. Am I right? I bet there are not a lot of real brothers up there.”

“Yeah, I guess not … I don’t know, Torrence. Look, I’m kinda tired. I think I fried my brain or something. I’ll talk to you later.”

He hangs up the phone, wondering if he has trouble arguing with Torrence because some of what he says may be right.

A few grueling days later—each day starting with a blistering exam and capped by an anxious late night of study—Cedric wakes up in a haze and goes to physics class. There’s a buzz in the room as midterms are handed back. Cedric forces himself to look down at the cover page: 4 points out of 26. Clean misses on three of the four word problems. He stands at his desk, walks out into the hallway, and lets out a scream.

Mr. Washington runs after him into the hall. “What’s wrong? Good God!”

Cedric, unable to speak, just waves the test paper at him.

“Come on, now,” says Washington. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. A lot of the material is new to lots of the kids. Just keep at it. It will get easier.” He looks carefully at Cedric, then tells him to take the morning off and go get some sleep.

In the afternoon, the calculus midterm comes back: 68 out of 104 possible points. God knows what Andrew Parker got, Cedric thinks, wandering out of the classroom, trying his best to look away from everybody and everything.

He avoids the MITES for the rest of the day. Walking across far reaches of the riverside campus until long after nightfall, he slips silently back into the room to turn in. Tossing and turning, too troubled to sleep, he sits up on his bed and looks out at the lights of MIT, trying on the hair shirt of failure, of his never making it to an undergraduate class at MIT or anywhere like it. The campus seems more beautiful than ever, with the white and yellow lights flickering at midnight over the football stadium. “I’ll never make it to this place,” he says to himself, seeing if he can say it. “I’m just fooling myself.”

As the hours pass, he falls in and out of sleep. When he wakes with a jolt, Cornelia Cunningham, an elder at Scripture Cathedral, is on his mind. A surrogate grandmother who had challenged and prodded Cedric since he was a small boy, “Mother Cunningham” died two weeks before he left for Cambridge. He packed the special pamphlet with her picture, biography, and her favorite prayers from her funeral in his suitcase for MIT.

At some unknown hour of the early morning darkness, Cedric feels like her spirit is with him in the room. He presses his eyes closed, not breathing, certain he can hear her saying, “Cedric, you haven’t yet begun to fight.”

A few hours later, he sits up, awake and befuddled, not sure if it was a dream, but then not caring, either. A message came through. He leaps out of bed and over to the desk, hunched forward in his pajamas, diving into calculus as never before.

T
he auditorium rings with raucous cheering as teams prepare their robots for battle. This is the culmination of a semester-long exercise in ingenuity and teamwork that the MITES do every year. In the program’s first week, each three-student team is given a small, remote-controlled engine and a box of levers, wheels, hooks, and plates to build a robot. Today, the robots will fight over a small soccer ball in an elimination tournament.

This year, something has gone awry. The trios, which in past years were carefully chosen and mixed by instructors with an eye toward
racial diversity, were self-selected this year by the students. The kids did what came naturally: segregated themselves based on race. As the elimination rounds begin, “Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico!” is chanted from the Hispanic side.

Black students whoop as Cedric’s team fights into the quarterfinals. When they lose in a tough struggle, Cedric—momentarily unself-conscious—stumbles in mock anguish toward the black section, into the arms of Jenica and Isa, who are anxious to come to his aid.

Tutors look on nervously as the auditorium divides into an edgy call and response. “Latinos Live!” shouts a row of Hispanic boys. “Africa Forever!” comes the return cry from the other side.

The winner, oddly enough, is a team led by the MITES lone Caucasian—a boy from Oklahoma who qualified for the program because he is
¹
/
₁₂₈
Potawatomi Indian. Both camps are muted.

Bill Ramsey looks on sourly at the fractious scene. Now is the time, with just over two weeks left in the program, that natural divisions between the program’s blacks and Hispanics should be easing after a month of socializing and competition.

Not to worry, he thinks, leaving the auditorium and walking across campus. The racial dynamic of this group will soon evolve along the same grid as in classes of previous years: the kids eventually move past the initial division of black versus Hispanic to a solidarity along the deeper fault line—minority versus Caucasian—as they realize that they’ll all face similar challenges assimilating into the white professional class. They’ll get plenty of messages about this in the next two weeks, from counselor chats about future careers to class discussions in English about being successful while retaining one’s ethnic identity.

He strolls into his modest office on the second floor of Building #1 (here, most buildings have numbers rather than names) and hangs his blazer over the back of the chair. He begins rooting across his desk and through the drawers.

“Susie, where’s that damn file on the acceptance rates?” he yells through the open office door to his assistant, a West African woman who rolls her eyes. “I’m sure it’s around somewhere,” he murmurs, pawing through a few more desk drawers. “If people wouldn’t always borrow it.”

Requests for the numbers come steadily, from MIT’s admissions office, from journalists, from writers of academic newsletters, and from a slew of other programs that have modeled themselves on MITES. This is the Cadillac of university-based minority enrichment courses, and the numbers, at first glance, are stunning.

Susie finally finds the file in the outer office, peeks in the doorway with a smile, and drops it on Bill’s desk.

“Have I told you that you’re brilliant yet today?” he flatters her and then asks her for the file of a student who will be visiting in a few minutes.

He flips through the thick folder of data, though he knows these numbers by heart. On average, 82 percent of the MITES who apply to MIT get accepted. His tracking of the kids is obsessive, prideful. Almost all the MITES who matriculate to MIT’s freshmen class end up graduating: sixteen graduates out of seventeen one year; another crop went eighteen for eighteen.

He puts the file in his out box to have some copies made as his assistant drops off the student file. It’s a black kid. There was a complaint from one of the girls from Puerto Rico about this kid being too touchy-feely with her a few days ago, making her uncomfortable. No big deal, happens around here a lot. Boys and girls, far from home, trying to figure things out.

He quickly reviews the file. Bad midterm grades, some comments from teachers and student tutors about him being volatile and depressed. Then a note from one of the student counselors about him seeming to emerge socially in just the last week or so. Fine, he thinks, so he’s feeling his way along.

He closes the file and leans back in his chair. Still a few moments until the kid arrives, so he looks out the window, something he’s doing an awful lot of these days, letting his mind drift elsewhere. He’s in good shape for a man of sixty-eight, still strong as a bull, though seven years running this program has taken a toll. When he first arrived, taking over a program that had been up and running for two decades, he had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America—kids who had somehow learned math and science in what are all but war zones—and give them the boost. Within his first year, he saw
he’d been dreaming. A few kids he’d chosen from those bleak spots were much further behind academically than he’d ever imagined. And they’re further behind now than they were then. It would take two years of tutoring, not six weeks, to bring some of the inner cities’ brightest up to a level where they might be accepted to MIT. Their similarity to the polished, suburb-bred minority kids goes little more than skin deep. Is it fair to set them up for a fall, or maybe worse? He’s had a few of them over the years, ghetto kids, and he’s seen it play out: they come up here filled with hope, people back home banking everything on them as the one who will make it out, proving that people
can
make it out. And what happens? They get a taste of the big time and at the same time they learn that a taste is all they’ll
ever
get. A whole program of those kids, he’d be raising suicide rates at MIT, something they already have enough trouble with.