A Hope in the Unseen (46 page)

Larry looks up and rubs his eyes; page two still to go. Jesus, he mulls, it’s an epic poem. God knows he didn’t expect this, but maybe he should have seen it coming. There were kids like Cedric, he recalls, at the magnet school in Cincinnati, a school that was about 60 percent white, 40 percent black. Plenty of the black kids arrived there from toxic inner-city junior high schools and were creatively gifted but short of basic skills. He used to see poems a little like this—verses, raps, or whatever—from the kids who could no more step back from the fiery elements of their poverty and blackness than some Vietnam combat vets could from the war. Everything was passed through the stark prism of their experiences and they just bled onto the page—sometimes awkwardly and, God knows, far from iambic pentameter—but often with a stunning inventiveness. Not that anyone expected their insightful effusions to take them very far; not, the joke was, until they included sections for poetry writing and personal testimony on the SATs. How,
he wonders, did this Jennings kid manage to get to Brown? He flips to the second page:

On Monday afternoon, Larry waits until the last moment to pass out the midterm papers, not wanting the kids to be looking at them during class. He hands back Cedric’s without any marks or a grade. As the class sifts out, the student comes forward.

“Why don’t you come by and see me in my office and we’ll talk about your paper,” Larry says, making sure his tone is upbeat. “My office hours are three to five on Thursday afternoon.”

Cedric stands there, stricken, holding the paper out in front of him like a burnt offering Larry might still, somehow, accept. “Don’t worry, Cedric, it’s nothing bad,” Larry says finally, and then watches ruefully as the student slips out.

Over the next three days, Larry finds that the “poem predicament,” as he dubbed it to a colleague, is regularly floating to the surface of his thoughts, making him reflective about his role as an educator, his twisting career, even his late ’60s stint in the Peace Corps in Colombia, South America. He remembers how wise some of those so-called primitive villagers were, people that he, a pink-skinned young man from Harvard, was sent to help.

Sitting in his office on Thursday afternoon, he knows he needs to arrive at some decision and unearths the basic boilerplate of his role as a college professor. The rules are clear: it was a passionate, evocative poem, maybe even brilliant, but not the assignment. Yes, someone in class made a light-hearted comment about writing a poem, but he clearly stated that anyone wanting to alter the assignment needed to get it cleared first. This effort utterly disregarded the assignment. That means a C or maybe even an F. He chews on this prospect for a moment and looks to shore it up, meditating that the upholding of accepted academic standards is precisely what enables institutions like Brown to offer a diploma that has meaning, a seal showing that the recipients can master valuable skills of reasoned discourse, of deduction, exposition, and logical thinking, abilities that will help them to approach any subject, no matter how foreign, throughout their lives.

He sits for a few moments, trying to get comfortable in this posture. There’s a knock on his open door. “Cedric, come in,” he says, rising, and the student sits on the edge of the office’s only other chair. “You know, I’ve thought a lot about your paper in the past couple of days,” Larry opens, warming up.

“You didn’t like the poem, did you?” Cedric suddenly elbows in, swallowing the last word. Larry’s planned monologue is disrupted, and he discards it. “Actually, Cedric,” he says softly, “I loved it. I was moved by it.”

A pursed smile, almost like relief, crosses Cedric’s face, and he and Larry just look at each other for a moment. The room seems warm and very quiet, and Larry, after such a long, bumpy journey to this place, suddenly feels younger and more trusting than experience should allow.

“I’m going to give you a B,” he says haltingly. “But you have to understand two things. Your final research paper, which has to be according to the assignment, may carry more weight than normal in your overall grade.”

Cedric nods, saying nothing, waiting for the second thing. Larry looks out the window, wanting to get it just right. “If you’re going to make it here, Cedric, you’ll have to find some distance from yourself and all you’ve been through,” he says after a moment, as he leans forward, making sure their eyes meet. “The key, I think, is to put your outrage in a place where you can get at it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you’re asked to embrace new ideas or explain what you observe to people who share none of your experiences.” He stops, sensing this may be futile. “Maybe I’m not making myself clear.”

“No, no, you are,” Cedric says, with an eagerness that startles the teacher. “I’m understanding more about that all the time. I really am.”

And Larry Wakeford, watching him go, is surprised to feel his reasonable doubts about this student’s future begin to lift.

C
edric looks down at his copy of the poem and then passes it across his cluttered desktop to Zayd, who’s sitting in Rob’s wooden chair.

“Tell, me what do you think, I mean which parts you like the best or whatever,” Cedric says as he watches Zayd begin to read.

They’re talking again. Cedric was the one who broke the ice, calling Zayd one night last week, one dorm room phone to another. “You know who this is?”

And Zayd replied, “Well, I used to have a buddy who talked a little like you, whoever you are.”

During the month of silence, Cedric missed having Zayd around, though he’d never tell him that. In fact, he doesn’t want to come right out and tell Zayd lots of things he’s realized lately, especially the nascent insights discovered from the writing of his wrenching sixty-eight-line poem. Cedric, of course, knew that the assignment was supposed to be a dispassionate analysis of diversity in the classroom, with examples and quotes and all that, and he tried writing such a paper. About eight times. But each start looked worse than the last, a bland paragraph or two that barely touched on the ferocious emotions that had been unearthed by his visits to Slater.

By early last week, forced into action on the night before the paper was due, some verses arrived in his head just like song lyrics sometimes do. It was just after midnight. With few alternatives, he began to fuss over opening lines and rhymes, trying to squeeze some concepts about tracking and homogeneous grouping into his own format. By 4
A.M.
,
bleary, with lines sixty-seven and sixty-eight beginning to swim together, he finally slumped off to sleep. It wasn’t until a few days later that Cedric read a copy in the clarity of day and realized that the poem was as much about his journey, his anger, and his regret as it was about the kids at Slater. Much of it, he recognized, might have been written for, and to, the kids at Ballou. That was mostly what he saw rereading it, that the poem was sort of a letter back to all of them, even his tormentors, telling them that he understood how, in the same way he needed to push against them, they needed to lash out at him.

But there was another thing he noticed: how a few lines spilled out about his own bottled-up yearnings that change occur more quickly than anyone could hope for, that he make it to a cool, easy place of acceptance he’s sure that he’s glimpsed up ahead. He wonders if Zayd can see it in there, too.

He looks over and clears his throat. Zayd has just finished reading. “It’s great, Cedric. I mean it’s poetry, really.”

“So?” Cedric presses.

“So what?”

“So, which line did you like the best, which part, you know, really said something to you?”

Zayd looks down again at the paper, glances across the ridge of his furrowed brow at Cedric, then down again, clearly understanding that this is some sort of test. “That’s easy,” he says after a moment, offering a tense smile as he holds the paper up to read it precisely.

“‘Always looking at same hues is really no fun,/Maybe I’ll just let the colors run.’” He throws the paper on the desk. “‘Let the colors run’ … that’s some very fine shit.”

Cedric can’t help but let out a little laugh. “All right,” he grins. “That’s my favorite part, too.”

So it’s settled. The next day, after lunch, they troll Thayer Street with an air of casual ease, like whatever prompted the rift was in some previous, forgotten stage of their friendship. But there has been a subtle change, an added attentiveness that strengthens their bond. At Sam Goody’s they fence over the worth of various artists: “Funkmaster Flex, that’s a ’70s guy,” Zayd says dismissively.

“Yeah, but he’s got ‘Busta Rhymes’ and new stuff on here,” Cedric
retorts. And then they argue about some other singers—D’Angelo and Monica—and who’s going in what direction on the
Billboard
chart. But there’s not really an edge to it. It’s like, Cedric thinks, they’re both trying to figure something out—in this case, about their original lingua franca of music—and it doesn’t matter who gets to the right answer first, or even if there is a right answer. Not that either one really has forgotten what happened. After Zayd lends Cedric $15 for a few minidisk CDs, saying, “Listen, that’s all the money I’ve got,” Cedric remembers to say, “Thank you, Zayd … and don’t worry, I can pay you back tomorrow.”

“I’m not worried about anything,” Zayd says with a casual nod.

It’s a busy time, with midterms coming, followed by a week of spring break, and they pause on the corner near Goody’s to break off. Nothing personal, just so much to do.

“I got to study for calculus,” Cedric says, holding the bag of CDs. “We’re doing integration series now.”

“Oh God, I hate that—Si, Fi—I did so bad in that in high school.”

“Oh, right,” Cedric says, prodding him. “Listen to you, ‘I did so bad but I still got an A.’”

“No, actually, I got a B in calculus.”

“I thought you told me you got straight A’s in high school.”

“Nope, one B.”

Cedric laughs, “All right, then,” and Zayd murmurs about some pressing reading to do for his media deconstruction class before they slap hands. “I’ll talk to you in a little,” Zayd says casually over his shoulder.

“Definitely!” Cedric calls back as he walks toward the Computer Science library, mulling over why it should now be odd to feel like Zayd’s peer, his equal. And, after a moment, all that’s left is to wonder what it was he was feeling before now.

T
here’s an air of expectation in the psychology lecture hall as two hundred or so kids trod in, feeling none of their traditional lethargy. Last class, they were told that the first of two midterms will be coming back today.

Nothing focuses a collegiate mind like a returned test, the kind of numerical measurement of worthiness that is rarely repeated in later life. For the freshmen majority in this survey course, a new score will, in moments, be factored into each student’s personal approval rating: a tracking poll on the issue of whether their acceptance to Brown was, in fact, some sort of terrible mistake.

“If I had them handed back in your sections, I could guarantee that half of you would forget to bring them to lecture,” says Professor Wooten, nodding toward a table lined with boxes to his left. “So I’ve devised a system for you to get them right now.” Students begin to file toward the stage. Graded tests are grouped alphabetically and placed in five boxes spaced across a wide table on the stage; lines form, and students quickly snatch their papers and return to their seats. Coming down the steps, stage left, Cedric glimpses down at his score, “30 percent, F,” and almost trips. He feels dizzy.