A Hope in the Unseen (2 page)

Today’s gathering of the mayor, the singer, and the guest DJs carries
an added twist: surprise. There was no mention of academic awards, just news about the mayor’s visit, the music, and the general topic of “Stay in School.”

As the R&B singer takes his bows, Washington steps forward, his trap in place. “I’ll be reading names of students who got straight A’s in the second marking period. I’d like each one to come forward to collect his $100 prize and a special shirt from WPGC. We’re all,” he pauses, glaring across the crowd, “very,
very
proud of them.” A murmur rumbles through the bleachers.

Washington takes a list from his breast pocket and begins reading names. He calls four sophomore girls who quietly slip, one by one, onto the gym floor. Then he calls a sophomore boy. Trying his best to vanish, the boy sits stone still in the bleachers, until a teacher spots him, yells, “You can’t hide from me!” and drags him front and center. A chorus of “NEEERD!” rains down from every corner of the room.

Time for the juniors. Washington looks at his list, knowing this next name will bring an eruption. “Okay then,” he says, mustering his composure. “The next award winner is … Cedric Jennings.”

Snickers race through the crowd like an electrical current. Necks are craning, everyone trying to get the first glimpse.

“Oh Cedric? Heeere Cedric,” a crew member calls out from the top row as his buddies dissolve in hysterics.

Washington starts to sweat. The strategy is backfiring. He scans the crowd. No sign. There’s no way the boy could have known about the surprise awards; most teachers didn’t even know. And Jennings, of all people. Jennings is the only male honor student who bears the cross with pride, the one who stands up to the blows. The only goddamn one left!

The principal clutches the mike stand, veins bulging from a too-tight collar, and gives it all he’s got, “Cedric Jenningssss … ”

A
cross a labyrinth of empty corridors, an angular, almond-eyed boy is holed up in a deserted chemistry classroom. Cedric Jennings often retreats here. It’s his private sanctuary, the one place at Ballou where he feels completely safe, where he can get some peace.

He looks out the window at a gentle hill of overgrown grass, now patched with snow, and lets his mind wander down two floors and due south to the gymnasium, where he imagines his name being called. Not attending was a calculated bet. He’d heard rumors of possible academic awards. Catcalls from the assemblies of last spring and fall still burn in his memory.

Off in the distance are skeletons of trees and, behind them, a low-slung, low-rent apartment complex. His eyes glaze as he takes in the lifeless scene, clenching his jaw—a little habit that seems to center him—before turning back to the computer screen.

“Scholastic Aptitude Practice Test, English, Part III” floats at eye level, atop a long column of words—“cacophony,” “metaphor,” “alliteration”—and choices of definitions.

He presses through the list—words from another country, words for which you’d get punched if you used them here—and wonders, scrolling with the cursor, if these are words that white people in the suburbs use. A few screens down, a familiar-sounding noun appears: “epistle.” Sort of like “apostle,” he figures, passing by choice “A) a letter” and clicking his mouse on “B) a person sent on a mission.”

He looks quizzically at his selection. Probably wrong, but he likes the sound of that phrase—“a person sent on a mission.” Sort of like me, he thinks, on a mission to get out of here, to be the one who makes it.

Cedric Jennings is not, by nature, a loner, but he finds himself ever more isolated, walking a gauntlet through the halls, sitting unaccompanied in class, and spending hours in this room. He is comforted by its orderliness, by the beach-blanket-sized periodic table above his head against the back wall and the gentle glow of the bluish screen.

He scrolls back to the top of the vocabulary list and reaches for a dictionary on the computer table. The classroom’s occupant, chemistry teacher Clarence Taylor, wanders into the room and registers surprise. “Didn’t go down there, today, huh?” asks Taylor, a bearlike man in his early forties, short but wide all over. “I’m disappointed in you.”

Cedric doesn’t look up. “They give out the awards?” he asks nonchalantly.

“Yep,” says Mr. Taylor.

“Glad I didn’t go, then. I just couldn’t take that abuse again,” he says evenly, this time glancing over at the teacher. “I’ll just pick up the check later. They have to give it to me, you know?”

Mr. Taylor offers a mock frown, now standing over the boy, eyes wide, brows arched. “That’s not much of an attitude.”

Cedric flips off the power switch with a long, dexterous finger. “I know,” he murmurs. “I worked hard. Why should I be ashamed? Ashamed to claim credit for something I earned? I hate myself for not going.”

He sits and stares at the darkened screen. He can hear Mr. Taylor ease away behind him and unload an armful of books on the slate-topped lab table near the blackboard. He knows the teacher is just fussing, walking through a few meaningless maneuvers while he tries to conjure a worthwhile response to what Cedric just said.

Mr. Taylor’s moves are familiar by now. The teacher has personally invested in Cedric’s future since the student appeared in his tenth grade chemistry class—back then, Cedric was a sullen ninth grader who had just been thrown out of biology for talking back to the teacher and needed somewhere to go. Taylor let him sit in, gave him a few assignments that the older kids were doing, and was soon marveling at flawless A papers. Taylor took Cedric for an after-school dinner at Western Sizzlin’, and they were suddenly a team.

In the last two years, Taylor has offered his charge a steady stream of extra-credit projects and trips, like a visit last month with scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He challenges Cedric with elaborate intellectual riddles, withholding praise and daring the pupil to vanquish his theatrical doubting with a real display of intellectual muscle. It’s call and response, combative but productive. Mr. Taylor even sets up competitions among the top students, like a recent after-school contest to see who could most swiftly write every element in the periodic table from memory. As usual, Cedric rose to crush the competition, reeling off all 109 elements in three minutes, thirty-nine seconds.

Cedric is still staring at the dead screen when he finally hears Mr. Taylor’s squeaky wing tips coming back around the lab table.

“You see, Cedric, you’re in a race, a long race,” the teacher says as
Cedric swivels toward him, his arms crossed. “You can’t worry about what people say from the sidelines. They’re already out of it. You, however, are still on the track. You have to just keep on running so … ”

“All right, I know,” says Cedric, smirking impatiently. With Mr. Taylor, it’s either a marathon metaphor or a citation from Scripture, and Cedric has heard the race routine many times before. “I’m doing my best, Mr. Taylor. I do more than ten people sometimes.”

Mr. Taylor clams up. So much for
that
race
metaphor
, Cedric thinks to himself, delighted to employ an SAT word. He jumps up from the chair and paces around the classroom, picking up things and putting them down, looking caged.

“So, did you mail the application yet?” Taylor asks, trying to keep the conversation alive.

“Yeeeess, I maaaiiiled it,” Cedric says, rolling his eyes.

This is not just any application. It’s a bid for acceptance into a special summer program for top minority high school students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s highly competitive, drawing from a nationwide pool and taking kids for an intensive six-week program between their junior and senior years. It offers academic enrichment but also sizes up whether the students could cut it at MIT. About 60 percent are eventually offered a blessed spot in the university’s freshman class for the following year.

Cedric does not dare speak about it to anyone except Mr. Taylor, who helped him with the application. He feels too vulnerable. His yearning is white hot. It’s his first real competition against invisible opponents—minority kids from far better schools—in what Cedric rightly knows is a dry run for the college applications that must be mailed in the coming school year. It could even mean a slot, eventually, at MIT.

It will be nearly two months before he hears whether he’s accepted, but the program is quickly consuming Cedric’s thoughts. His notebooks in math, physics, and English have MIT doodles—the three magic letters are Gothic here, three-dimensional there, then crossing over one page and written fifty times on the next. Being accepted there would be the reward for years of sacrifice.

“You think I’ll get in?” he asks, awkward and momentarily exposed, but catches himself. “I mean, you know, whaaaatever. What does it matter?”

“Will you get in?” begins Mr. Taylor, launching another discursive riff. “Well, let me note … ” The class bell rings, interrupting him, and Cedric prepares to go, having lost his taste for an answer.

The hallways fill as a wave of students from the gymnasium washes through the school. Leaving the chemistry classroom, Cedric keeps his eyes fixed forward on a shifting spot of linoleum about a yard ahead of his front foot. He hears someone from behind, a boy’s voice, yell, “Where was you Cedric—hiding in the bathroom?” followed by a burst of nearby giggles, but he won’t look up. Just don’t get into it, he says over and over in his head, trying to drown out the noise.

Today, though, it’s no use. He wheels around to see a contingent behind him, two hard-looking boys he barely knows and an accompaniment of girls.

“Why don’t you just shut up,” he barks, facing them while backpedaling. “Just leave me alone.” Fortunately, his math class is the next doorway and he slips into the almost empty classroom, relieved to have avoided an altercation.

“Ready for the test today, Cedric?” asks Joanne Nelson from her desk across the room. She’s a round, soft-spoken, dark-skinned black woman who also had Cedric in tenth grade.

“Uh-huh,” he nods, regaining some composure. “Yeah, I mean, I think I’m in real good shape.”

The test is in Unified Math, his favorite subject. Each day, Cedric looks forward to this class, composed of eighteen kids from Ballou’s special math and science program.

With the program, Ballou is attempting a sort of academic triage that is in vogue at tough urban schools across the country. The idea: save as many kids as you can by separating out top students early and putting the lion’s share of resources into boosting as many of them as possible to college. Forget about the rest. The few kids who can manage to learn, to the right; the overwhelming majority who are going nowhere, flow left.

Cedric, like some other math/science students, applied to the program and arrived a year early to Ballou, which allows a handful of ninth graders to enroll with the eight-hundred-student tenth grade class. While at Ballou, the math/science students mix with the general student body for subjects like English and history but stay separated for math and science classes, which are called “advanced” but are more at a middle level of classes taught at most of the area’s suburban high schools.

Slipping into a favorite desk, Cedric watches as the rest of the class arrives, mostly girls, many of them part of a tiny middle-class enclave from nearby Bolling Air Force base. He is friendly with a few of the girls, but today the room is tense and hushed, so he just nods a quick hello or two. Soon, everyone is lost in the sheaves of test papers.

It takes only a few moments for a calm to come over him. Knowing the material cold is Cedric’s best antidote to the uncertainty that sometimes wells up inside him, the doubts about whether any amount of work will be enough to propel him to a new life. He takes out his ruler and confidently draws two vertical lines, noting points for asymptotes, limits, and intercepts. He moves easily through the algebraic functions on the next few questions, hunched close to his paper, writing quickly and neatly, the pencil’s eraser end wiggling near his ear. For half an hour, he is steady and deliberate, like someone savoring a fine meal.

When he arrives at the last question—which asks students to write about the topic they have found most interesting thus far in the semester—he starts tapping his pencil on the desk. So much to choose from.

Finally, he begins to write: “The part that most interested me was finding the identity of the trigonometric functions. I had a little bit of trouble with them at first, but they became easy!” He reels off ten lines of tangent, sine, and cosine functions, an intricate equation springing effortlessly from his memory, and arrives at a proof. Cedric sits back to admire his work. It’s so neat and final, so orderly. So much confusion, all around, such a long way to travel to get out of this hole, but here, at least, he can arrive at modest answers—small steps—that give him the sensation of motion.

He’s done and puts down his pencil. Still ten minutes to the period
bell. Suddenly, he smiles for the first time in days and again grabs the dull No. 2. Across the bottom, he scribbles “I LOVE THIS STUFF!”

E
ach afternoon, there is a choice of bus stops. The stop right in front of the school is usually quiet and empty late in the afternoon, while another one, a few hundred yards away on bustling Martin Luther King Avenue, is always hopping.

At 5:02
P.M.
on this day, a week after the awards assembly, Cedric Jennings emerges from Ballou’s side entrance, having already finished his homework and another SAT practice test in Clarence Taylor’s room. He slings his bookbag over his shoulder, freeing his hands to pull closed his three-year-old black parka with the broken zipper. Day by day, he’s hearing fewer barbs in the hallways about the awards assembly, and his spirits lift a bit as he sees a fading late afternoon sun shining across the teachers’ parking lot. He pauses to look at it a moment—there hasn’t been much sun lately—and decides today to opt for Martin Luther King.

In a moment, he’s strolling on the boulevard—Southeast’s main street of commerce, legal and otherwise—and taking in the sights. There’s a furious bustle at this time of day. Darkness, after all, comes earlier here than in those parts of Washington where the streetlights work, where national chains have stores with big neon marquees, and where everything stays open late. In those places, the churn of commerce isn’t halted, as it is here, by a thoroughly rational fear that seems to freeze the streets at nightfall.