A Hope in the Unseen (45 page)

He mulls over all this as he walks, haltingly, down Thayer, looking
at his watch and realizing they’re probably all at Cafe Paragon already. It’s a cool but brilliantly clear evening, stars out, and he pulls closed the neck of his bulky green parka.

He sees Cafe Paragon a block down the street, bustling with people flowing in and out the door. It’s really a bar at night, with lots of noise and drinking and smoking, the kind of place he’s been warned against visiting his whole life—by Bishop and his mother—a licentious spot where anything might happen and the last place a holy person, a special person of God, ought to be.

Just a few feet away from the entrance, he hesitates and veers right into the College Hill Bookstore, grabbing a
Billboard
off the rack. He quickly flips through the top 40, top 20, Top Albums, Top Singles, total revenues, CD sales figures, and realizes he’s already memorized all of them from a
Billboard
he bought a week ago. He stops, gently closes the magazine, lays it back on the rack, and just stands there, feeling a sudden nostalgia for his shut-in’s life of television, CDs, and friendships with two-dimensional images. It’s clear (so achingly clear as he hovers, empty-handed, near the wall of glossy magazines) that he’ll need to start unfolding in some fresh and frightening ways to keep moving forward.

The inside of Cafe Paragon is smoky and as loud as a train station. Everyone hails a welcome as he plunks down in an empty chair at the end of a long row of pushed-together tables, conveniently near the door.

It feels fine to be in here, sort of energizing. Everyone except Cedric orders food—he’s already eaten and has no money, anyway—but the conversation, ricocheting across the table, offers plenty of sustenance. It’s mostly guys from the unit, six of them—plus Maura McLarty, Zeina Mobassaleh, and Corry Mascitelli—and Cedric doesn’t feel he needs to say much. His presence alone seems to be appreciated. Ira Volker, sitting cattycorner to Cedric’s left, eventually engages him in a heated discussion about the unavailability of Tupac Shakur’s latest CD single. Ira is digging in with the position that since it’s not being stocked at Sam Goody’s up the street, it can’t be bought. Cedric, grinning, slams him with knowledge about CD packaging and distribution, capping it with, “I study music, do you study music?” When
he looks around, Cedric realizes everyone at the table is taking delight in his show, and he laughs airily. In this warm wash of ease, Cedric then listens intently to the talk of national politics and summer internships, even though he doesn’t care much about either subject.

As nine o’clock nears, everyone starts pulling out driver’s licenses or fake IDs to try to order beer, and Cedric feels an urge to go. He doesn’t have a driver’s license, something he’s embarrassed about, and drinking beer is definitely something he has no intention of doing. So he sings a verse of “Happy Birthday” to Rob and rises.

“Thanks for coming, Cedric,” Rob says.

And Cedric nods, “Thanks for asking me.”

Walking back to the dorm, he senses that he’s taken a step, albeit small, in an intriguing direction, and the brisk night air feels good on his face. Back in the dorm room, still feeling the bracing air in his nostrils, he sticks to his evening plan. The Grammy Awards are on tonight, a show Cedric watches every year. He flips on the TV and settles in. Despite a great gospel number—where Shirley Caesar is joined by Whitney Houston, prompting Cedric to leap from his bed and sing lustily—the Grammies end up being a disappointment. Mariah Carey, one of his favorites, is aced out on best album, the second to last award, leaving her with no Grammies despite six nominations. Cedric watches her dispirited face flash across the screen and turns off the TV, not so much disgusted by her losing as with him being a person who would care so much.

He opens the door, pokes out his head, and then leans against the frame. Zayd walks by with Bear on their way to Zayd’s room. Neither looks his way. Sonya Garza and her white liberal Minnesotan roomie, Nicole, are on the carpet arguing, good-naturedly, about politics near where Evan, at the end of a phone line stretching from his room, is telling his girlfriend from Tufts that “we’re not really growing together.” Rob runs into the room for a moment, having just called home for his birthday from the third floor—respecting Cedric’s viewing privacy in a way Cedric suddenly wishes he wouldn’t—and mentions how his Dad “just thanked my Mom for that moment nineteen years ago” before he skips out into the hallway to wrestle with Abby over an ice cream cone, the two of them laughing flirtatiously.

Watching the whole circus, a smile plastered on his face, makes Cedric feel gloomy and, at the same moment, strikes him with an overpowering desire to break free from himself and dive into the flow, to not be so conscious, all the time, of how he looks and where he’s from, to get past whatever it is—anger or envy or just otherness—that seems to be holding him back.

He retreats into the room, letting the door slam shut, and sits down at his desk. He’s supposed to write an entry in his journal tonight about Slater and flips through his pages of notes—rantings, really, of his outrage at the way the kids are treated, about the injustice of it. He reads them once, then again, but writes nothing in the journal. Tonight he can’t seem to locate his fury.

L
arry Wakeford stares in silence at the blonde, butch-cut, mischievously cocked head of a student—a delightfully contentious senior named Leslie—and notices a ray of late afternoon sunlight reflecting off her nostril stud. He chuckles.

“Listen, Leslie, I’m not sure if I’m actually exercising some sort of tyranny or not. I’m just giving guidelines for an assignment,” he says while leaning forward, fingertips on the edge of the seminar table, in a purposeful pose. “I think we need some sort of rubric, some sort of accepted criteria for our work in this class … or there would be chaos. We all can agree on at least that, can’t we?”

Murmurs ripple across the room, a lovely, high-ceilinged address on the second floor of stately Sayles Hall, with dark wood paneling, aged to perfection, narrow twelve-foot windows, and twenty students in Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education who are just limbering up.

The issue du jour involves “rubrics,” or how the format of an assignment can favor the strengths of some students and highlight the weaknesses of others or, in any event, how it can stifle creativity. The subject, discussed theoretically in previous classes, has circled around to delicious relevance on this early March Monday’s discussion of the upcoming midterm paper. It is noted simply on the syllabus as “five
pages, typed, double-spaced, on the topic of diversity in the classroom, using observations from each student’s fieldwork.”

Larry is certain of one thing: his winking suggestion that the syllabus line may just be a starting point, that the students may actually search for “some sort of criteria” that “we all can agree on” and have it stick, will mean a few minutes of edgy, vigorous discussion. He crosses his arms, leans his back against the chalkboard, and lets them have at it, winning a respite, after an hour of lecturing, to watch how various kids might connect educational theory to their passionately held views about grading and fairness.

“Why couldn’t we, for instance, write a three-act play that deals with issues of diversity in the class we’re observing,” says a thin white boy, one of only three guys in the class.

“Well, let’s not forget you have to include observations from your journal
and
some attendant analysis. But—a play—hmmmm, maybe,” Larry shrugs, keeping it going as a girl near the far wall discusses various writing styles that might be “untraditional, yet, you know, appropriate.”

As he watches, he gets the “this-is-what-I-came-to-Brown-for” rush. He knows he’s an oddball around campus: a fifty-one-year-old assistant professor, nontenure track, whose appreciation of teaching on this hallowed academic ground is heightened by long years of deprivation, twenty-five, in fact, slogging through eleventh-grade biology classrooms and assistant principal jobs at public high schools.

Sure, there were years he loved it, especially the eleven years in Chapel Hill, where professors’ children from the University of North Carolina mixed with a manageable minority, 20 percent or so, of black and Latino kids from the town’s poorer sections.

Then it fell apart, all at once. His marriage of twenty-five years collapsed. That was the main thing. Unattached, with his kids already off to college, he followed the Chapel Hill principal to Cincinnati and spent a year as an assistant principal at a well-known magnet school in the city.

That’s where he read an ad in
Education Week
magazine about three-year teaching stints at Brown, with possibility of renewal. High
school teachers were encouraged to apply. Larry immediately realized that competition for the fellowships would be fierce, but, beyond being a damn good teacher, he had some reasons to be hopeful. He’d had Ted Sizer, Brown’s famous education professor, back when he was getting his master’s in education at Harvard in the late ’60s; his mix of teaching and administrating might intrigue them; and he “presented” well, with his easy, affable manner, accessible good looks (much like the fatherly, gray-haired actor William Windom), and the slightly rumpled demeanor of a professor, all tweed and oxford cotton and rep ties. He looked like he belonged at a university. People always used to say that.

He’s up for renewal for a second three-year stint in a few months. He looks at his watch—5:25—about five minutes left in today’s class. Better rein it in. “I think the key element some of you are not considering is the issue of skills: that you’re not only here to freely express yourself on a particular subject but also to build certain time-honored skills, like clear expository writing and analysis. That’s a big part of what you need to be evaluated on.”

The class quiets, considering this.

“I mean that doesn’t work all that well for me,” says Cedric. Larry looks over. Cedric and a Latino girl from modest, inner-city origins are the two students that most intrigue him in the class, kids who are now observing life at the kind of awful schools from which they sprung. “What do you mean it doesn’t work for you, Cedric?” he says softly, trying to draw out Jennings, who doesn’t talk much in class.

“I don’t know,” Cedric says after a moment. “It’s just that the things I see at my junior high school get me so angry, so passionate, that it’s hard to be all intellectual, or whatever, about it.”

“Why don’t you write a poem about it!?” chirps Leslie from across the room, as everyone, Cedric included, begins to laugh.

“Well,” Larry says, checking his watch again, so they’ll all know time is up. “I’ll leave it this way: if anyone wants to propose a different rubric for this midterm paper, they need to clear it with me first. Otherwise, five pages, double-spaced. See you all next time.”

On a Friday afternoon a few weeks later, Larry closes the door to his small office in the education building, sits back down at his desk
chair, and gazes at the phone-book-sized stack of midterm papers. Best to just shut himself in and push through the grading, however long it takes. He promised he’d hand back all the papers on Monday. By dusk, after a few hours hunched over his desk, he’s well over halfway done. Most of them are what he expected—kids lifting observations from their journals, mostly mentioning exchanges between the teachers and their students, then weaving in some footnoted passages about diversity or tracking from the three books they’ve had to read thus far in the semester. In a few papers, he sees an occasional bit of original analysis. He marks a B at the bottom of the paper before him, scribbles a few comments, and puts it in the completed stack.

He looks down at the next one. “Oh God,” he laughs, a full page of verse. Actually, he realizes, flipping it over, two full pages. He turns back to the first page and looks to the top right—“Cedric L. Jennings.”

Shaking his head, he lifts his red Flair pen and begins to read.