A Hope in the Unseen (43 page)

T
he bus rumbles along a ravine that winds down from College Hill onto a wide asphalt plain of pawn shops, convenience marts, and vacant stores. It’s a part of Providence that Cedric has never seen, and he looks intently out of the bus’s scratched, cloudy window. Everything they pass is gray, from the dirty mounds of frozen snow to the steely clouds in a murky sky to the people—white and then, increasingly, black—who scuffle along, their faces obscured by wraparound scarves or tightly tied hoods as they try to get somewhere before the cold gets them.

Ten minutes on, after a dozen turns, he wraps his fingers around the bar of the seat ahead and pulls himself up straight to get a better look out of the wide front windshield. That must be it, he surmises, spotting a sorry-looking box of red brick with white limestone archways and ledges: Slater Junior High School.

It’s February 6 at ten of eight, a forbiddingly cold day with a stiff dawn wind that seems to have kept the sun from rising on the first day of Cedric’s Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education course. Arrangements have already been made by the seminar’s professor for an undergraduate to attend classes here two mornings a week, so there are only a few formalities at the first-floor principal’s office before Cedric can go to the classroom he’ll be observing on the school’s second floor.

Clutching a visitor’s pass, he wades into the early morning swells of seventh and eighth graders on their way to first-period class, all of them looking very young and innocent to him. He knows otherwise, of course, because he knows this place without having to open his eyes.
Though he’s spent most of his life in schools similar to this, he knows he’s supposed to reach beyond that now and also become a dispassionate observer. So, feeling clumsy and outsized, like some sort of black Gulliver, he clomps forward, noting the exposed pipes running along the twenty-foot ceilings, the bulletin board with homilies to build self-esteem, and the rough mix of students, more than half of them either black or Latino. The white kids, though, don’t seem to be any better off than the rest, a poorer version he’s never seen. He overhears a cluster, passing in the opposite direction on the stairwell, speaking in a foreign language that sounds like Spanish. Upstairs, he checks room numbers on the cross beams of door frames until the right one appears, and he ducks his head in.

“You must be Cedric,” says a fortyish white guy in khaki Dockers, a white button-down, striped tie, and brown Timberland bucks. He has a thick mop of longish graying hair and a full beard. “I’m Mr. Fleming. Welcome to eighth-grade mathematics, also known as the funny farm.”

Cedric laughs, surprised to be looking down slightly at the teacher, who is consequential and wide-shouldered, and must be about five-foot-ten. With a precious few minutes before the first-period bell rings, Cedric offers a thumbnail resume—noting his interests in math and education, his hometown, how Brown is a “great school and all”—and Mr. Fleming lets him in on the most important things he needs to know about Slater: “A lot of the kids you’ll be seeing have troubled lives at home … the neighborhoods around here are poor … the prospects for these kids are not very good.” Then he sweeps through a cursory overview of guns found in lockers and concealed knives as he studies Cedric’s face, searching, it seems, for a clue about whether he’s looking at a black college student who knows of such mayhem or someone, like almost everyone else, who’s only heard about it.

Cedric is not about to let on. “I understand what you mean,” is all he says, barely nodding, as half the desks in the room fill and class starts. Mr. Fleming tells them that Cedric is a Brown freshman who will be observing the class for the next two months. Cedric, sitting at a utility table near the door, finds himself nodding to the kids—almost all black or Latino in this, the lowest of nine math sections in the eighth grade.

Mr. Fleming proves to be loud and acerbic and sometimes coyly
wiseguyish. He keeps a semblance of order by raising his volume when needed. It’s a game of cat and mouse. One girl pulls another girl’s hair. A boy kicks another boy’s shin across the aisle. Notes are passed and laughter suppressed. One kid sleeps soundly near the window. Mr. Fleming runs through basic math exercise on the board, reducing fractions, asking for answers from the class, though he seems to not call on certain students. Cedric notices one in the back, a slim black kid who never raises his hand but seems to instantly know all the answers, often just blurting them out. After a bit, Mr. Fleming booms at him, “DID I CALL ON YOU!? WELL, DID I?” The student is unfazed, and after Fleming has moved on, the slim kid turns to Cedric. He can feel the boy’s eyes sizing him up. Others are quietly studying him as well. And Cedric is studying them back, and studying Mr. Fleming, too, taking notes on a piece of loose-leaf paper. He pushes forward, though the whole affair seems bizarre: them all looking at him, him at them, searching for answers. Answers to what? Answers for whom?

The class ends, and a few kids cluster around his chair, their eyes almost even with his. “You really a freshman at Brown like he said?” one of the black girls asks with a tone of disbelief.

“Yeah, why’s that so surprising?” he chuckles, as he spots the slim black boy shuffling slowly around the periphery.

“Just, you know, not that many people I heard of going there,” says another black girl in the group, as several of the kids and Cedric nod at once, no one having to talk about things they all seem to understand.

After the classroom empties, Mr. Fleming sits on the edge of the utility table, wanting to talk to Cedric in the few minutes before the next class arrives. There will be three more classes before Cedric leaves at twelve, “all of them tough, but none tougher than this one you just saw,” he says, noting that a lot of those kids were classified as “special ed” for emotional or behavioral problems, like about half the students at the school.

He leans in toward Cedric, conspiratorially. “You know,” he whispers, “I can tell the ones that will die when they leave here, when they leave this school. I can see them. You look at them hard enough, long enough, and you can tell. You really can.”

The words slice open a blister of confused emotions that bubble
from Cedric for the rest of the morning. Other classes come and go. Cedric takes more notes, most reflecting on how Mr. Fleming passes judgment with his booming admonitions and cutting asides. “One false move and Marlin gets it,” Fleming says at one point, putting his finger against the head of one boy in the midst of some elaborate criticism. “Listen, there’s no way you checked this over,” he blares later at a girl who tries to hand in a worksheet early. “Carelessness will get you killed in here.” Cedric’s pages fill with notes. And by the time he silently slips out, just before the last class ends, he finds himself murmuring fantasies about what Mr. Fleming will say to him next time, or the time after, that might offer an excuse “to put my big black fist in his face.”

After the long bus ride back and a quick lunch in the cafeteria by himself, Cedric retreats to the eighth-floor stacks of Brown’s computer science tower. Sitting in a carrel near the window, he splays out his notes, looking them over and letting the rage simmer through him. He can tell the ones “that’ll die when they leave here.” How can he tell? They’re just kids! He’s writing them off before they even get a chance. Sure, some of them have behavioral problems—what else could they have, growing up the way they live!—but Fleming treats them like they’re worthless, like he’s looking right through them.

He pushes the note pages aside and opens the black-and-white-speckled cover of his “A-Plus Compositions” notebook. Carefully, in the upper right corner, he writes 2/6/96, marking the first entry in his journal.

Below him, the Brown campus seems small and distant, like a fragile scale model of brick buildings and domes, squares of grass and tufts of bush. Yes, this is where he lives now.

He turns away from the window, grabs the black pencil, and writes, with point-breaking pressure, the first line of his journal: “As soon as I walked into the school, I felt at home.”

B
rown University?” asks the man with a smile that reveals his surprise. He’s a middle manager at the Department of Agriculture’s division of food inspection and safety. “An athletic scholarship?”

Barbara Jennings looks evenly at him—a slight fellow, born in India,
she thinks, who has long been boastful about the academic prowess of his daughter, who just started at the University of Maryland. A fine school, of course, but not Brown.

“I don’t believe they have athletic scholarships in the Ivy League,” she says, giving her tone just the right mix of condescension and impatience. “Anyway, he’s
there
because of his academics.”

With a nod, she continues down the hall and turns into her cubicle, not feeling as good about her tart reply as she expected she would. It’s a late afternoon in mid-February, and she settles in for the last hour until quitting time. She no longer answers her phone by saying “Process Products,” and the branch’s new name, “Food Safety,” may not last either. There’s been lots of turmoil at cumbersome federal departments like agriculture lately—more restructuring, though, than actual cost cutting. A few promotions she’d hoped for never came her way, and a slot that recently opened above her went to someone younger. It once might have bothered her, stirring memories of how many college graduates she’s trained over the years, mostly white men, and then watched ascend. But fretting about her advancement, at the office or elsewhere, is not something she’s inclined to do much of these days. She types some figures on meat inspection onto her screen, part of a report on food safety to be presented at a Congressional hearing by a deputy agriculture secretary, then turns to one of her friends at a nearby desk.

“So, you ever think they’ll do that slave museum thing?” Barbara asks.

The woman chuckles, “I know they ought to, that’s for sure … and make you the curator,” a comment that compels a laugh from Barbara, something she welcomes these days like sunlight. Talk about “the slave museum” has settled into running commentary for the division’s mostly black female support staff since they moved into this office six months ago and learned that it was once a slave quarters and transport station, a place where slaves were housed from up and down the coast or just off boats from the ports of Washington and Baltimore and auctioned. Apparently, some artifacts from those days are in a warehouse somewhere.

Rich fare it is, indeed, for the black ladies of the typing pool, especially the ones who long ago learned to swallow their ambition and
sometimes still feel it growl in their stomachs. Ladies like Barbara. Not that she was always that way. When Cedric was still at home, she’d conscientiously report to him about any small bump up in her pay, or any added responsibility she’d assumed, wanting him to feel like she was on the move too, just like him. That was a long time ago. Every day it seems she discovers something she once did, some way she once acted or thing she once said that was designed to put up a good front or send Cedric a message she thought he’d need.

Not much point in facades anymore. He’s getting older, and it’s harder for her to hide things. He found out that she didn’t end up going to Chris’s house last Thanksgiving, like she said over the phone when he called from the Korbs’. She just ate some leftovers and went to bed. Christmas wasn’t much either, and Cedric seemed a little disappointed, though he didn’t say so. In fact, over the winter break, Cedric didn’t say all that much. Everything was cordial, and it was nice to have him with her at church—everyone so proud of him—but the privacy zone that once extended to the borders of his small bedroom had grown to envelop a whole mysterious life in Providence. She tries, always will, to give him bits of advice, telling him not to worry about what other kids are doing, partying and all, not to lose trust in God and to stick with his studies. But she’s not sure whether he listens or, in her very darkest moments, whether he ought to.

The day is done, and she wanders outside in the cool, cloudy late afternoon. It’s a church night, and she’s looking fine in a new paisley patterned dress and maroon shoes. Her shoes are the only thing that gives her much joy lately. The floor of the closet in her room is full of them, every shade, stripe, and style.

A few hours later, she enters the sanctuary and chats with some of the missionary ladies she’s known for years, many of whom have noticed she’s been looking good lately. “You all turned out tonight, Barbara,” one says.

“Oh, this old thing,” she replies, always mindful of how delicate issues of material success can be at Scripture.

Tonight’s sermon is about temptation. Long says it’s about “how we all stray from the Word of God in our lives, and how only repentance
can show us the way back.” Barbara opens her Bible to a verse Long cites in Kings. But after a moment she finds herself looking at the bookmark rather than the text. It’s a postcard she got a few months ago—a mailer, but addressed to her, from a travel agency in Florida. It offers a package trip, a “nine-day Florida and Bahamas vacation,” costing only $398 for two people. Four years ago, she went on one of these cheap cruises to the Bahamas with Valerie Hobbs—a daughter of her godmother—and they had a real time. She looks to her left and right in the pew and turns the postcard from upright to horizontal, flattening it against the open book so no one can see. She looks at the palm trees and the soft, pale white beach. Nine days … $398 for two. But whom would she go with this time, she wonders. She gazes into the wide center section of the church, passing over the familiar faces of women and a few men. No one from here—no one from this place of public piety and sacrifice—seems suitable. If there was a special man, that sure would be nice, but no candidates in these seats. She tucks the palm trees back inside the worn black covers of the King James.

Barbara gets her usual ride home and ends up back at the apartment at about ten, a little earlier than usual. It started raining sometime during church, been threatening all day, and she brushes off the moisture from her shoulders. She gets the mail from the lobby lock boxes and climbs the stairs.