A Hope in the Unseen (19 page)

Nothing inspirational about that one, Cedric thinks, as he sits back.
The paranoid, monstrous Thomas of the public’s imagination comes into view. Words and images that have been bumping around in Cedric’s head for weeks—ever since this meeting date was set—come rushing in, one after another—the justice sitting at the Senate hearing table; Coke cans and pubic hairs; Long Dong Silver; “high-tech lynching;” and then Anita Hill’s angelic face, cool under fire. He feels his gut tighten. Cedric wonders if he should ask Thomas about Anita Hill. He’d love to, in a way, just ask him, straight out, What went on there? But he dismisses that notion quickly as Thomas’s angry face seems to float before him.

A moment later, that image is replaced. “Glad you could come, Cedric,” says Justice Clarence Thomas, reaching out a thick, hammy hand. Cedric smiles dumbly, holds out his fingers, and is jerked to consciousness by the justice’s crushing grip. He’s led through an airlock of huge oak doors that lead to Thomas’s chambers and onto a large, blue leather couch. Thomas pulls up a chair for himself. Cedric can’t take his eyes off him. The guy is huge—only about five-foot-nine but wide and stacked like a pro football player, his biceps straining the fabric of his white dress shirt.

Thomas begins talking about the
Journal
story, about how he sees and mentors a lot of young people and then about some program he helps run—the Horatio Alger Society—that supports top black students with scholarships. “You know, that might be something for you to get involved with, Cedric.”

Sunk deep in the couch, Cedric feels like ocean waves are crashing in his ears. He nods, telling Thomas he’ll get involved “for sure. That’d be great.”

The justice leans forward in his chair and looks intently at Cedric, clearly able to see the film across the youngster’s eyes. “You know, Cedric,” he says softly, “I sense that you and I are a lot alike. I have a sense of what you’ve been through.”

Hearing those words, Cedric seems to calm. He meets Thomas’s gaze and smiles, feeling his face muscles loosen. “This is quite an office,” Cedric says as his eyes wander from the paintings of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass to a picture on the mantel of a young man about his own age, who must be Thomas’s son, and then to
a foot-high religious statuette on the end table near Cedric’s right hand.

“That’s St. Jude,” Thomas says. “You know what he’s the saint of?”

Cedric, unaware of Catholic dogma, shrugs, though he’s happy to feel the conversation land on the terra firma of religion.

“Causes beyond hope,” Thomas says. “Hope for the hopeless.”

“I know something about that,” Cedric says, proud to get off a quick quip. Thomas heartily laughs, scrunching his nose in a way that makes him look boyish.

Staring at the statue, he begins reminiscing, telling Cedric how he won it for placing first in the annual Latin Bee at a nearly all white high school—a Catholic boarding school—that he attended in Savannah in the mid-1960s.

“After I won it, I put it on my bureau in the big, open dorm room where we all slept. A few days later, I looked over and saw the head was broken off, lying there right next to the body on my bureau where I’d be sure to see it. I glued it back on. After another few days, it happened again. So I got more glue—put it on real thick—and fixed it again. Whoever was breaking it must have gotten the message: I’d keep gluing it forever if I needed to. I wasn’t giving up.”

Cedric looks again at the statue—its neck jagged and chipped—and then back at Thomas, trying to imagine what this imposing man, now in his late forties, looked like at sixteen. The dark images of Clarence Thomas are now easy to discard. Instead, Cedric sees a solitary Supreme Court justice who still remembers slights from three decades ago. That broken statue is the same sort of cheap shot that is slung at Cedric each day, he muses, and here this guy has managed to get pretty far despite all the naysayers. Cedric wonders, though, how many of the indignities he’s suffered at Ballou he’ll still carry with him a decade or two from now.

“Sounds like you had to fight every step of the way,” Cedric says, egging Thomas on, wanting to hear more.

Leaning back in his chair, his wing tips on the magazine table between them, the justice is anxious to oblige. He tells about being an illegitimate child, how his mother was overwhelmed and his grandfather
eventually raised him under iron codes of discipline. Cedric is prompted to open up about his dad, and the church, and how his mother “tells you to do it once, and never twice.” When Cedric mentions how hard he studies—nights, weekends, and summers—Thomas recalls how he learned algebra one summer after he got his hands on an old textbook. And around they go, matching each other—Cedric laughing, Thomas chewing on an unlit Macanudo and waving it as a prop—as an hour goes by, then another.

Thomas talks about growing up speaking Gullah, a pig English that was common among blacks in parts of the rural south, especially along the Atlantic seaboard, and is still spoken on some Caribbean islands. “For me, English was a second language—still is, I guess,” he says, and Cedric laughs, realizing that Thomas, who speaks with the practiced precision of James Earl Jones, is joking. “I just worked at it, Cedric, working on my pronunciations, sounding out words. That’s why I became an English major as an undergraduate at Holy Cross. I didn’t say much in class. I was afraid, afraid of being embarrassed. But eventually, I knew I could speak properly. I got some confidence, but I had to work for it, to earn it.”

Having brought up college, Thomas asks Cedric if he knows where he’s going next year. Cedric—proud to offer up a Latin Bee victory of his own—tells him, “You bet. I’m off to Brown University.”

Thomas frowns and shakes his head. “Well, that’s fine, but I’m not sure if I would have selected an Ivy League school.” Sliding his bulk down in the too-small chair, he stretches his feet out and rests his chin against his breastbone. “You’re going to be up there with lots of very smart white kids, and, if you’re not sure about who you are, you could get eaten alive.”

Cedric, his brow furrowing, grows quiet, and Thomas chooses his words carefully. “It’s not just at the Ivies, you understand. It can happen at any of the good colleges where a young black man, who hasn’t spent much time with whites, suddenly finds himself among almost all whites. You can feel lost.” Thomas tells him a story about a kid from Georgia who went with him to Holy Cross—“smartest black kid I ever knew”—who “got confused about who he was and ended up getting addicted to drugs and dropping out.”

Cedric looks on, pensively, wondering, Why is he telling me this? No doubt getting into Brown was a great victory—it’s one of the best schools in America—and Thomas, after all, went to Yale Law School. Cedric remembers Thomas’s law school classmates from the hearings. What does he know, Cedric mulls, that I don’t?

He leans forward, inching up to the front edge of the couch cushion. Thomas is becoming increasingly animated by the prospect of Cedric going to Brown. He’s talking faster now, reaching out his wide arms. “No doubt, one thing you’ll find when you get to a school like Brown is a lot of classes and orientation on race relations. Try to avoid them. Try to say to yourself, I’m not a black person, I’m just a person. You’ll find a lot of so-called multicultural combat, a lot of struggle between ethnic and racial groups—and people wanting you to sign on, to narrow yourself into some group identity or other. You have to resist that, Cedric. You understand?”

Cedric nods, understanding enough of what Thomas is saying to at least respond, “Like, you mean, that you have to be your own person.”

“That’s right! That’s it!” The justice is rolling, cutting swiftly across the terrain of affirmative action and quotas and something he calls the “liberal elite,” his hand chopping the air for effect. But he’s not looking much at Cedric. It’s more like he’s preaching to people who are not here.

Thomas suddenly stops. “Cedric. What are you thinking of majoring in?”

“Math, I think.”

“Good. Good. That’s what I look for in hiring my clerks—the cream of the crop. I look for the maths and the sciences, real classes, none of that Afro-American studies stuff. If they’ve taken that stuff as an undergraduate, I don’t want them. You want to do that, do it in your spare time.”

As he talks, Cedric recalls that there
were
two guys in their mid-twenties who passed through the office while he was sitting among the wooden signs—could have been Thomas’s clerks—but they were both white. Then a third white guy walked by after a bit, maybe a clerk as well. It strikes him … of course
they
wouldn’t be taking any Afro-American studies. Wayne is clearly some sort of administrative aide, not
a clerk. Does Thomas not have any black law clerks? Is it because they don’t apply, or because the justice doesn’t want them?

“Cedric? Listen, Cedric!” Thomas exclaims, now almost exuberant. “You can’t be going out, partying on weekends or going to Florida on spring break. You just have to keep studying, like your life depends on it. Some of these kids will be ahead of you, for sure, but you just have to outwork them. That’s the way you’ll beat them. It was that way with me, too. There was no safety net. No choice. To fail means to drop all the way to the bottom. It was that way for me. Same for you.”

Cedric nods, but his lips are pursed. Thomas’s enthusiasm suddenly seems to be gleaming with fury. It unsettles Cedric, makes him feel like he’s going off, barely armed, into some sort of battle with white kids. He doesn’t want to fight them, he thinks. He just wants to be part of something bigger, with kids—black kids, Hispanics, whatever. With everyone being a top achiever, just like him.

Thomas gets up from the chair and strolls around for a moment, loosening up after the rhetorical workout, and Cedric looks down at his watch. It’s almost 4:30. He’s been in the office nearly three hours.

Thomas fusses with a few things on his huge, baronial mahogany desk and looks up, smiling sheepishly. An afternoon has passed. Looking at Cedric sitting quietly now on the couch, a sympathetic look crosses the justice’s face. He sees that Cedric has been frightened by his dark vision.

“I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” he says gently, walking slowly toward him as Cedric rises from the couch. “It’s just that I understand, in a very personal way, how big a step you’re taking. When you get on that plane, or train, at the end of the summer and leave home, you won’t ever really be able to go back. But you may find you’re never fully accepted up ahead either, that you’ve landed between worlds. That’s the way I feel sometimes, even now, and it can make you angry. But you just have to channel that anger, to harness it.”

Cedric, standing eye to eye with the justice, finally finds a sentence forming in his head, a response from down deep.

“Well, you know, I guess I’m just hoping I won’t have a reason to become an angry person. That I’ll be accepted up ahead for who I am.”

Clarence Thomas smiles a warm and melancholy smile as Cedric shakes his hand in gratitude—a firm clench this time—before slipping past the end table with St. Jude and out the door, curiously happy to be headed for home.

M
ay is a month for assemblies at Ballou, a time of diminished classwork and even lower than usual attendance, when there is little to do except gather students in the auditorium. Any excuse will do.

This mid-May Tuesday is called “Awards Day” for the general presentation of awards. At the front of the receiving line in the half-filled auditorium is Cedric L. Jennings: from the Association of Telecommunications Managers and Associates, $1,500; from Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, $1,000; from the Washington Chapter of the American Society of Military Comptrollers, $7,000 over four years; and then there’s Para-mount’s Kings Dominion Scholarship, $1,000. Matching him is the quiet and studious LaCountiss Spinner—with her own cache. James Davis gets a few awards for his all-around efforts, and twenty-two Ballou students who were selected back in junior high by the “I Have a Dream” Foundation (a national network of benefactors who guarantee college tuition to anyone who eventually needs it) walk up to get certificates commending their achievement thus far. LaTisha’s in that program, and so is Phillip Atkins, a last remnant of his days as a straight-arrow eighth grader. A middling, earnest student named Lawan Foster who is often homeless (her mother a drug addict, her brother hiding from gang vendettas) gets the “Beat the Odds” award from the Children’s Defense Fund.

And then there are kids who are recognized for the achievement of simply participating in various clubs, like the band, ROTC, or the Ballou Sapphire Models—a row of lithe, tight-jeaned girls, hair swirled in impressive fountains, who squeeze by LaTisha, in the aisle seat, on their way up front to receive gold-embossed certificates.

By noon, it’s all over and the kids file out, many of them—even some crew members who happened by—shuffling along as they study the four pages of smallish type at the back of the awards booklet, the section called “College Acceptance, Awards, and Scholarships.”

Leaning against a wall outside the auditorium, Cedric bears down on his booklet—couldn’t very well read it up on stage—matching what he’s heard about who’s going to college, and where, to what he now sees in type. It fascinates him: a final tally for so many math/science kids he knows and, more broadly, for the 850 or so sophomores who entered Ballou nearly three years ago as the Class of 1995. According to this list, sixty-four students have been accepted into a college of some type, twelve of them into the come-one-come-all University of the District of Columbia. Many of the institutions are black colleges, like Washington’s nationally known Howard University and smaller schools like Bennett College and Lincoln University.

Cedric, not necessarily unique in raw talent, shows how he is anomalous in his lofty collegiate ambitions. Under his name is Brown, along with the names of institutions that eventually recruited him, including Duke University, George Washington University, Brigham Young University, and Florida A&M, a black engineering school near Orlando.