A Hope in the Unseen (31 page)

Sitting alone on his bed one Saturday night, there’s a knock on the door and a few kids from down the hall crowd in, rosy with anticipation of a night of some drinking, an off-campus party one of them has heard about, and then, who knows, maybe some late-night pizza.

“Hey Cedric, come on,” one of them says.

“Naaaaaw,” says Cedric, declining nicely, trying to show he appreciates their asking. “I just don’t do that kind of stuff.” And everyone nods meaningfully, though Cedric can tell they don’t really understand. In a moment, they’re gone.

Just as well, he thinks, half meaning it. Self-denial and a strict code of dos and don’ts are, at this point, knitted into his very being. “It’s who I am,” he says to himself, over and over. “I can’t change now.” He gathers up his laundry and spends the next two hours in the first-floor laundry room, flipping through an issue of
Billboard
he’s already read—a Saturday night with the spin cycle, just like the last two, hoping someone from his unit will happen by and then hoping they won’t. Back upstairs about midnight, his clothes folded and the dorm empty, he fusses with his CDs, playing and replaying beloved tracks, singing the songs with perfect inflection. One of his favorites comes on. He begins a dance, one step, then slides and spins. But, twirling around, his reflection is framed in the closed window—a young black man dancing alone in his room—and he feels like a fool.

Two days later, on Monday night, October 1, he can’t take the solitude anymore and ventures out into the hall. People passing in and out of rooms are, invariably, friendly. He imagines that they view the quiet, tallish black student as an oddity, a curiosity. Whoever gets to know him first, really know him, will have stories to tell and the rapt attention of others. So Cedric, sensing this diffident fascination, smiles at all comers but offers few openings.

At the end of the hall, a door is open and both roommates seem to be hanging out. It’s John Frank and Zayd Dohrn’s room—two guys with many options. If the social life of this unit were a tennis tournament, John and Zayd would be the number one seeded doubles team.

John was born to thrive here. He’s Jewish and conventionally handsome with brown hair and green-blue eyes—bright, affable, and engaging. Beneath that and a three-day growth, he’s also shrewd and sophisticated. Among the thirty-three kids on the second and third floors of East Andrews, he’s off to the fastest start, already a member of the Brown Derbys, the widely known Brown a cappella group whose mixture of song and shtick draws big crowds. He’s also probably the first to
get laid, groveling with a unit-mate after one of the first weekend’s parties.

“Hey, it’s Cedric,” John says, genuinely surprised, ushering him in. “Entrez!”

Cedric wanders around, taking in the room. John’s side is a disaster, even messier than Rob’s lair, with clothes piled so high and wide that the bed looks like a plateau on top of a lush fiber mountain. “My Gaaawwd,” Cedric says.

“Just got done cleaning,” says John, his standard line.

The other side of the room is as neat as Cedric’s—a few books stacked in one corner of a spotless desk next to a bottle of hand cream, a few avant-garde posters, several pairs of stylish shoes and boots perfectly aligned on the closet floor. Reclining on a bed with tight hospital corners is Zayd Dohrn.

“Yo, C,” he says. “’Bout time you dropped by.”

“Oh, hey Zayd,” says Cedric, who has had a few brief hallway encounters with the tall blond. But his attention is elsewhere, at what must be the largest CD tower in the unit. It’s John’s three-hundred-CD monstrosity of spinning shelves, a tower that the two roommates share, standing like a lighthouse above the mess. Cedric is drawn to it, amazed.

“That’s quite a CD collection. Wow,” Cedric says. “Just look at it.”

“They’re mostly John’s CDs,” says Zayd.

“But the ones Cedric’s admiring are yours,” says John.

Cedric spots plenty of familiar music. Hip-hop artists, rappers, soul, rhythm and blues. “You got ‘Ready to Die,’ by Biggie Smalls? I mean, you know, a white guy with this stuff?”

“Yeah,” says Zayd, “I think he’s great.”

For the first time, Cedric’s stark notions about white America are blurred. He looks at Zayd, back at some other titles, and then at Zayd again. Yup, still white.

Then it’s like there’s no one else around and the two of them are just talking, real easy and natural, about hip-hop artists they like and lyrics that really hit home. Zayd is not only informed and interested, he actually defers to Cedric’s knowledge.

“You know, Biggie is married to Faith,” Cedric says, mentioning the female R&B artist Faith Evans and plucking one of her CDs off the tower.

“What? Really?” says Zayd.

“Yeah,” says Cedric, offering up some choice morsels. “They sometimes refer to each other in the music. Oh, it’s a whole thing.”

“For real?” says Zayd, adding a touch of street to his voice.

And Cedric grins, “Fo’ reeeeeal.”

Later that night, lying in bed, Cedric is still sort of smiling to himself. If he is a hopeful kid by nature, it may be because in his darkest moments some glimmer of light has often appeared. He’s not certain—not yet—but he thinks he may have found his first friend at Brown.

In the darkness, he tried to think back across the previous few weeks to any brief encounters he’s had with this Zayd—from Chicago, Cedric thinks—trying to fill the outline with some more color.

One moment comes into focus. It was the very first week of school, when everything was loose and open, before cliques started forming. He was standing in the hallway with Kim Sherman, the artistic girl from Tennessee, and Zayd. They were right near the door of Mimi Yang, the senior psychology major who is the unit’s peer counselor, looking at an envelope taped to her door that was overflowing with condoms and latex gloves, a sort of low-rent safe sex dispenser.

“What’s that glove for?” Cedric asked.

“It’s for fisting,” Kim said, and told him how homosexuals sometimes use their fist for anal sex and that it can transmit the HIV virus.

“Yeah, right, fisting,” said Zayd. And then to Cedric, “You never heard of fisting?”

“Naw. Gaaawd. It’s gross. I mean, it’s worse than oral sex,” said Cedric, venturing to the limits of his sexual knowledge.

“What’s wrong with giving a woman oral sex?” asked Zayd.

Kim added, “Listen, Cedric, just about every guy tries that.”

“Not where I’m from. Black guys don’t do that, except crack heads or something. Why would you want to be down there?”

Kim giggled and looked over at Zayd, whom she kind of likes.

“Oral sex is my forte,” he said, as Cedric stared at him, astonished by his candor. Zayd shrugged. “Hey, I’ll try anything.”

Yes, Cedric remembers it all clearly. What kind of person lives by such a credo? This college sure is one strange place, Cedric laughs to himself. Zayd? What kind of a name is
Zayd?

C
hiniqua Milligan rushes into the reading room of Brown’s sprawling modernist Rockefeller Library, searching for a familiar face. Across a carrier deck of linoleum, she spots the group of boys chuckling at a table tucked between the towering periodical racks. She speed walks across the room. “Sorry I’m late—can’t believe all you are still here,” she says, huffing.

The male quartet from Wheelock’s class—Cedric, two other black students, and a student from Japan—is delighted. Cedric jumps up, “’Bout time you made it,” he says, smiling, and helps her with her chair as the other boys look her up and down, real quick.

It’s the first meeting of the Richard Wright study group. Tonight’s task is to plan a class discussion on
Native Son
—a discussion this group will lead next class—but little was accomplished by the guys in the hour before Chiniqua’s arrival.

Once she settles into her chair at the reading room table, work commences quickly. Questions are listed, and one of the black guys says he’ll type them up and print out copies. In a few minutes, everyone is dispersed.

Outside the library, on one of the first cool evenings of autumn, Chiniqua and Cedric begin the long walk back to the dorm. As the only two black freshmen in Unit 15, it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to size each other up pretty well over the past month.

Cedric, who has been looking futilely since he arrived for someone fitting his profile, sometimes jokes—when he and Chiniqua bump into each other and no one else is around—that she’s a “ghetto girl in disguise.” She laughs politely at this. But Chiniqua Milligan is actually more of a paradigm of what’s possible in urban education when commitment is matched with real money. Her father is a bus driver, and her mother is a teacher’s aide. Chiniqua and her sister were raised in an apartment in a black working-class neighborhood of upper Manhattan called Inwood, forty blocks north of Harlem. As a studious sixth
grader, Chiniqua was pulled out of line and offered a stunning gift. She entered Prep for Prep, a much hailed Manhattan-based program that identifies promising black and Hispanic sixth graders from the New York City public schools. It offers them tutoring on one weeknight and on Saturdays and then places them into the city’s top private schools as seventh graders. Cedric has already bumped into a few Prep for Preppers at Brown and is certain he’ll meet more. He’s heard they’re all over this campus.

For them, Brown doesn’t have to offer affirmative action. It’s already been handled, long ago. Chiniqua, who scored an 1100 on her SATs, received years of counseling—both academic and social—to assist with the collision of cultures she ingested each day crossing fifty blocks of Manhattan.

She rose through the exclusive Columbia Prep, a cocoon for the children of Wall Street chieftains and assorted celebrities, including Woody and Mia, Robert DeNiro, and Bill Cosby. She beat out nearly everyone, graduating third in her class. At Brown, she’s thriving in a tough pre-med program and manages a heavy schedule of classes.

The O.J. Simpson acquittal was yesterday afternoon, and the university is embroiled in racial discussion, though not
between
the races. It’s all intramural, as it is throughout much of the country, with whites moaning to whites as they feel the bite—in many cases for the first time—of being clobbered in what escalated into a racial contest. And many blacks, so accustomed to being routed by whites, feel a swell of jumbled, out-of-context pride.

Chiniqua feels some of that pride and senses that Cedric must, too. Out of all the kids in the unit, however, they can discuss such sensitive racial sensations only with each other. “So what’d’jou think?” Cedric asks. “Him getting off. You think he’s innocent?”

“All I know is that it’s over and a lot of people I spent the last couple hours with are crazy angry—though they won’t say nothing around me.”

Tonight was Brown’s traditional response to the divisive national or campus issues: a mandatory “outreach” meeting held in all the freshman dorms. Chiniqua tells him that’s why she was late to the library.

“Oh yeah, the race outreach,” Cedric says sheepishly. “I just didn’t go. I just decided I wasn’t.”

“Well, I went,” she says with a how-could-you look. “I was the ONLY one there.”

“Was it bad?”

“No, just like always. All of them just talking. No one says anything. Everything’s fine, everything’s good. He’s acquitted, so what. It’s nothing special …. We is all saints here, anyway.

“Only about half the unit showed up, even though it was supposed to be mandatory,” she continues, moving easily between black-speak and flawless diction in her usual speedy canter. “Some other people were there, some facilitators, and we did these exercises. They asked us questions, like, when we were kids, were our dolls of many colors, or all one, you know in terms of their skin tone. And you stand up if yours was a certain kind of doll … people didn’t know what to do.”

They walk for a while in silence. Cedric looks over at her, catching a glimpse of the side of her face, with its high cheekbones and large, dark eyes. She’s compact, about five-foot-six, with a lean figure that’s adorned artfully in a short leather skirt and turtleneck, wide belt, and midcalf boots. She knows he’s looking and likes it, looking forward at nothing and looking good.

“Oh yeah,” she says, remembering one other thing. “I told the facilitators I had to leave early, that I had this other meeting. They were so deflated. It was like the whole thing was going to collapse with no black person to look at.” She laughs lightly at this, reconciled over years to often being the lone black in any room.

Chiniqua is sophisticated—for better or worse—in ways that she knows Cedric is not. Close contact with whites is no novelty for her. She’s been a passing friend and fierce competitor of white kids for years. She knows some are nice, some are not—just like blacks—and they’re no more gifted or graced. It was she, after all, who wrecked the grading curves in high school. White kids? There’s a lot about her that they can never, ever understand and not much hope of any breakthroughs anytime soon.

Like a lot of black and Hispanic kids who come here from integrated
settings, she finds herself already drifting toward her designated racial enclave. Much like the assimilated Jewish kids drawn to orthodox Sabbath services at Hillel House, Brown offers Chiniqua—who was reluctant to attend militant black rallies in Harlem or troll clubs on 125th Street—a sterling opportunity to reestablish her racial bona fides and validate her blackness. Safely inside these gates, she can now pick up a dose of black culture pasteurized by ambition, whether it’s a tweedy, just tenured black professor talking about radicalism at a coffee klatch or fellow black achievers partying hard this week because next week is already blocked out for studying.

In the past two weekends, she’s been going over to dorm room parties at Harambee House, Brown’s lone black dorm, and has tried to lure Cedric over. They’ve definitely become friends. He’s a little awkward, she thinks, but kind of nice and not bad looking. It could develop into more. But he’s hard to size up. A few weeks ago, he said something about having spent his whole life with blacks and wanting to see if there’s a place for him among nonblacks.