A Hope in the Unseen (29 page)

“Yeah, and some of this other stuff,” she says, lifting her fresh stack of books for Political Theory 101 and, for her freshman English seminar, The Sentimental Novel.

“That’s so much reading,” he says weakly. “You sort of an English person?”

“I guess, I like to read,” she says. She’s very sweet.

“Yeah, I wish I did, too,” he says. “I wish I had started liking it about ten years ago.”

She laughs and says maybe she’ll see him in Spanish as she strolls to Jane Austen and the Victorians. He looks to his left. Martin Gilbert’s new biography
Churchill, A Life
is piled five feet high, topped by a tilted copy, sticking Churchill’s bulldog mug right in Cedric’s face.

Oh God, he thinks, I should know who he is. He grabs the book and flips through. “Churchill,” he whispers after a moment, committing it to memory. “Prime minister of England during World War Two.” Then he gently replaces the book, looking up to make sure no one has spotted him.

Standing there amid the bustle, he lets out a deep sigh, a thank you—to God or whomever—that he opted for lower-level classes and pass/fail. Pride, he mulls, can get you in big trouble.

He looks at his watch. The bookstore is closing soon. He still needs to figure out his fourth class and sprints over to the resource counter, grabbing the course books with student ratings.

Flipping through, Cedric rates them simply as to risk of failure. Philosophy of Science? No way. Moral Philosophy? Too much reading. Anyway, philosophy is boring.

He spots a pile of textbooks at a nearby table and figures he might learn more by flipping through them.

Elementary Psychology: An Introduction to Mind and Behavior
. He fans some pages … much too technical. “Should it be so technical?” he murmurs. He grabs a Physics 3 textbook. Pelcovits, his adviser and a physics professor, told him to avoid it in the first year. Still, he flips through, realizing that Mr. Momen taught him lots of this material. Confidence boosted, he rushes back to the information desk, where two twentysomething employees are sitting near piles of course catalogs.

He asks one—a fat white kid with moppy hair—if he knows what courses are already full.

“Huh?” He’s just there to tell kids where books can be found. Out of the corner of his mouth, he says sarcastically to his partner, a short, chubby girl with bad skin, “Do we know which courses are full?”

She rolls her eyes and addresses Cedric in a Shari Lewis Lambchop voice, like you might a five-year-old: “Maybe the registrar knows.”

Cedric knows the white girl is dissing him, but there’s no time to fret. He just shakes his head and grabs another course book. The page splays opens: Religious Studies. He looks for a moment at the long list of selections—Religious Ethics and Moral Issues; Introduction to Islam; The Darker Side of Human Existence; Religion, Colonialism, Nation Building. Provocative topics, all, but he stops. There’s a voice in his ear … Bishop Long. God knows, he doesn’t want to be learning something that directly contradicts what he’s learned at church.

Or does he? He remembers Bishop’s warning of two weeks ago—almost word for word—about the perils of trusting reason too much.
Cedric, ushered here mostly by adrenaline and faith, realizes he’s now facing a living, breathing, credentialed counterpoint to his revered Bishop. Nothing theoretical about it. Around here, nothing is exempt from dissembling questions and critical examination—not even religion itself. He can see Bishop’s one eye, looking through him, and hear the words, “The only true answers lie with God.”

He discards Religious Studies and cracks the catalog back open: Education Department. The courses seem attractively neutral, more about the “hows”—how knowledge is passed. Staring right back at him is History of American Education. Prof. James. That’s it! The fourth course. The bookstore is closing in ten minutes. He quickly grabs what he needs for Spanish, Calculus, Richard Wright, and now History of Education, as he runs—past Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Kant, Faulkner, Shakespeare, the whole Western Canon—for the cashier, feeling like he’ll escape intact.

But he’s not out the door yet. Pulling out his ID and bookstore charge, he realizes that another famous dead white male is staring at him. It’s from the cover of
Rolling Stone
, on a rack right near the Dilbert books—a black-and-white headshot of a guy with long gray hair, a beard, and glasses; two dates are listed under his chin, like when someone dies. Cedric looks intently at the face, snatches the magazine, and flips it open. “Thaaaat’s right,” he whispers to himself, feeling forearmed and slightly strengthened. “Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead.”

At eleven o’clock the next morning, the bell above University Hall rings and a bagpiper begins playing a generic Scottish march. Four students—one black, one white, one Asian, one Hispanic; two boys, two girls—hoist a large “Class of 1999” banner, brown with red piping, and lead a snaking line of chatting, mostly backpacked students through the ornate iron Van Wickle Gates, the uphill entryway to campus from downtown Providence. The tradition is to carry that banner out the same gates four years from now as this, the last class of the twentieth century, graduates.

Few ceremonies as grand and formal as this are to be found anywhere outside of the Episcopal Church. As a bell from the clock tower joins the one from University Hall, 219 professors, in their gowns and caps of crimson, royal blue, and deep purple—like a sedate Renaissance
festival—follow the incoming freshmen onto the main green. A forty-two-piece wind ensemble plays Schubert.

The convocation speaker is Elie Wiesel, the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Holocaust survivor, scholar, poet, philosopher, and all-around conscience for hire. He reminisces for a while and throws out a few light aphorisms before turning bleak and discussing Bosnia and balkanism, victims of wars, and conflicts across the globe.

“Unless one wants to lie,” he says, brow furrowed, the breeze lifting his comb-over skyward, “I am rarely truly hopeful.”

After the speech, students wander off in the warm breeze to opening-day classes, where syllabi are passed out, first assignments are given, and little else is done.

Cedric is especially enthusiastic about the instructor in his Richard Wright seminar, a black graduate student named Stephan Wheelock. “He seems really cool and smart, you know, and relaxed,” he tells Rob as they walk to the cafeteria for dinner.

Rob talks excitedly about biology—his probable major—and how it’s okay that he can’t get into Biology and Gender, a hot-button course at Brown, because he can get into Marine Biology, one of his passions. “With classes starting, something’s changed,” he says quietly, suddenly introspective. “You know, like we’ve slipped out of our shell, or shed our skin,” and Cedric nods, thoughtfully.

A few moments later, the Unit 15ers gather at two long tables, and Cedric, feeling heady from his conversational victories at lunch yesterday, throws out a line. “I can’t believe that people take a shower without flip-flops on,” he says. “It’s so dirty.”

Sitting across the table, the black girl from his unit (he’s found out that her name is Chiniqua Milligan and she’s from upper Manhattan) smiles like she understands him. “I wear flip-flops, too,” says Chiniqua’s roommate, red-haired, freckled Maura McLarty. “I wish everyone did.” She, Chiniqua, and Cedric all nod affirmations at each other. The desire to belong is palpable, with everyone looking for connections. Any link will do.

The hypergregarious Ira Volker passes by from a neighboring table, doing a random survey of who’s drinking milk versus soda. “Look, he’s like Casey Kasem—just skinnier,” Cedric says, pointing at him, another
flawless TV connection, prompting a round of giggles. Ira continues with data collection: “I’ve polled everyone, and we’re all getting along with our roommates.”

Cedric says, “I have
big
roommate problems,” and Rob, at the far end of the table, eating an ice cream cone, slumped down in his chair, offers up a sly smile—closing off any inference that his roommate might not be joking—and Cedric returns the favor by smiling back.

After the long years of self-exile and, often, isolation, Cedric is now drunk with freedom. “Maybe I’ll read Richard Wright tonight or we’ll call some girls and have an orgy,” he says later, settling back into the dorm room as Rob flops on his bed, chuckling.

Cedric is just grinning, speechless. He has finally arrived. And at moments like this, with too many jumbled and onrushing emotions to tag with words, he sometimes feels that songs help him make sense of things.

Cedric begins to sing an old Boys II Men tune called “It’s So Hard to Say Good-bye to Yesterday.” It’s a slow, sweet rhythm and blues number, a favorite that begins with the lyric “I don’t know where this road is going to lead me.” Rob looks up, quietly astonished.

T
he freckled blonde girl sitting to Cedric’s right in History of Education—8:30
A.M.
to 9:50, M, W—is leading the class … in sleep. It’s a mere ten minutes into this morning’s lecture, the last in September, and she’s already gone, chin buried in her collar, head bobbing gently.

Public sleeping has a way of spreading across a lecture hall. Someone hears soft, steady breathing from a neighboring desk and soon offers an accompaniment, which is why eyelids are drooping at desks near the blonde in what soon will become an informal sleep study.

Professor Tom James, a sort of opaque, soft-spoken man in his early forties, is no match for the lack of natural light and the humming ventilation system in this basement classroom. Still, he pushes forward gamely—there’s a lot of ground to cover in this survey course—and by 8:55 he’s tying social characteristics of late-eighteenth-century American progressives to the emergence of public educational institutions, schools that carried, he asserts, “an evangelical fervor in what they saw as the serious business of educating youngsters, especially the hordes of immigrants.”

Cedric looks over at the sleepers and shakes his head. “How can they sleep?” he murmurs under his breath. “They must already know this stuff.” He turns back to his notebook and scribbles “imigrant.”

“How many of you have been to Ellis Island?” James asks, drawing ten hands out of the thirty attendees, a high ratio among the conscious. Ellis Island is not a core concept in Southeast Washington (it is, in fact, the sort of white people’s history often passed over in favor of Afrocentric
studies), and Cedric has never heard the reference. He jots the word “Ellis” on his pad. It floats on a white sea, without context.

“What happened to that evangelical fervor?” James asks the class. “Have we lost it along the way?”

On Cedric’s left is his unit-mate Maura McLarty, a red-haired Irish girl bred in the strong public schools of Andover, Massachusetts, daughter of an administrative judge. Already on her third page of precise notes, she listens intently as a talkative student in the first row parries with James on the “evangelical fervor” question. The religious metaphors, meanwhile, prompt Cedric to put down his pencil on a thin half-page of scribbles and daydream of Scripture Cathedral.

One month into this new world of higher education, Cedric Jennings’s chin is barely above the waterline. So many class discussions are full of references he doesn’t understand—he often feels like a foreigner, like one of those Asian kids he sees in the math lab who can barely speak English but can integrate fractions at blinding speed. By now, he understands that Maura
knows
what to write on her pad and the sleepers
will
be able to skim the required readings, all of them guided by some mysterious encoded knowledge of history, economics, and education, of culture and social events, that they picked up in school or at home or God knows where.

Class is dismissed, and Cedric nods a farewell to Maura and moves quickly for the door, happy to be alone as he walks across campus to Spanish, a class that offers a brief respite. There, at least, everyone stumbles along on the same uncertain footing of
como estás
and
bastante biens
and he doesn’t feel as conspicuous or obtuse or ill prepared as he does in education class … and almost everywhere else he goes at Brown.

The day is sunny and splendid. Blazing yellow and red leaves that draw peepers to this part of New England are crunching under his Nikes. The thing he loves most, he decides, is walking between classes, a time he can feel purposeful, like he’s on his way somewhere.

After Spanish, he affords himself an indulgence. Dr. Korb sends him $200 on the 15th of each month for miscellaneous costs and spending money. The money tends to go fast, but today he still has a little left from the September check, and he decides to go out for lunch.

All it takes to eat well at Cafe Paragon on Thayer Street, where the eavesdropping is superb, is $10. Every stratum of the Brown society is represented here—from godlike tenured don to midlevel administrators, assistant and associate profs, grad students and lowly undergraduates. The atmospherics are mixed just right. The music is Euro-funk, edgy but quiet enough to allow for easy conversation at the closely packed mahogany tables. The waitresses are a carefully selected sampling of the university’s comeliest females in all-black outfits, the skin-snug tank tops provided by management. Here, gentleman profs can drink musty Warsteiner Ale or Italian Peroni Beer (both $3.25) to wash down a thoroughly adequate burger ($2.50). For undergraduates, meanwhile, the Paragon is a just affordable luxury of theoretical adulthood and an escape from Food Service cold cuts—though, usually, freshmen get carded.