A Hope in the Unseen (51 page)

A moment later he slips away from the din and out into the midnight air. A light drizzle is falling, and he feels settled and ready to sleep. There’s so much to try but also plenty of time to move forward slowly and deliberately, to taste life judiciously, to savor it. He passes a beach party at one fraternity where they’re playing “Can’t Hurry Love” by the Supremes and a semiformal affair at another, where he glimpses couples dancing to “Copacabana” in a bluish light. From somewhere, probably an open dorm window, he hears salsa music and then walks by a silver van, called the Silver Truck, from which a long line of hungry kids, each having emerged from a different flavored party on the main quad, waits patiently, brought together by the universal craving for a late-night cheese-steak sub.

What a world, he laughs. What a world. And he removes his leather cap so he can feel the rain.

T
he final fitful month of the school year is an entropic period, when the usual glow from dorm lounges, late-night pizza parlors, and fraternity keg rooms steadily ionizes into free-floating panic and rushed preparations for final testing and departure. Very soon, the energy will escape completely, leaving Brown University empty, save for echoes, as the heat of summer arrives.

While upperclassmen understand all this, freshmen simply feel themselves dissolving, day to day, as they sprint, term paper in hand, by azaleas blooming on the main green or struggle to acquire a taste for coffee. The necessity, by April’s end, is to have plotted a strategy for sophomore housing, and little cliques of two or three are now all set for off-campus apartments, multiroom Brown suites, or single rooms in the same dorm. Many of them will keep in touch with dormmates. Any upperclassman can tell you that. They’ll bump into each other on the main green, maybe share a few meals in the cafeteria or grab neighboring desks on the opening day of a class next September. But by then everyone will have learned their introductory, adult lessons about how friends can return to being near strangers, how intimacy alone doesn’t necessarily harden into a compound that lasts.

As the last month unfolds, the thirty-three students in Unit 15 root around for appropriate feelings and proper responses to onrushing events, starting with the final blowout weekend on April 19 and 20. While parties across campus jam to twice their usual size—accommodating interlopers from near and far—the kids of East Andrews, realizing suddenly how their days are numbered, try to
recapture some of the rosy-cheeked spontaneity of last fall. They rove about in bands of fifteen or so—just like in September—gaping at the crowds and working hard to get drunk or high or both.

Cedric Jennings shows up for several parties and doesn’t imbibe. Then he joins with nearly everyone in his unit for the weekend’s high moment: a concert by the Fugees, a trio of middle-class black kids whose R&B/hip-hop/rock/reggae confection crossed from black to white audiences sometime back in February, pushing them toward the top of the charts.

It’s the last of Cedric’s memorable firsts (he’s never been to a pop concert before) and a suitable capper to a springtime of exploration. He finally finds himself lost in a diverse crowd, swaying and singing in the front row next to Chiniqua. It’s a moment without self-consciousness, where there are no distinctions, where what he loves is loved by everyone else, smart kids of all races from across the country. Swept up by the moment, Cedric falls in love with the Fugees’ stunning lead singer, Lauryn Hill, an almond-eyed beauty who sings flawless reggae, jazzy hip-hop, and a lilting cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.” She winks at this crowd; after all, she happens to be a sophomore at Columbia. Looking up at her on stage from the front row, feeling the audience tug and sway, Cedric realizes he hasn’t felt so at home in a crowd since he was a kid at church.

All he has to do, ultimately, is join this crowd academically. It will take a strong finish. It will be a struggle. But he doesn’t feel cowed by the challenge; he’s ready to do whatever it takes, ready to clinch it with a show of force, feeling as though he’s won a sort of conditional membership in the Brown community that he’s desperate to make permanent.

He sits down one rainy Tuesday night in early May, the day before the beginning of reading period (a week when classes end or hold review sessions leading up to finals), mulling schedules and strategy. Spanish is cake; with a little studying, he’ll easily pass the final and get a satisfactory for the course. With Cedric’s calculus average in the high nineties, Berman told him a few weeks back that all he has to do to clinch an A is complete the project he’d forgone in March in favor of the midterm. Doesn’t even have to take the final, but he will. He may
well major in math and wants his average in the class to be conspicuously high.

Psychology, he knows, will be a battle, but at least he’s made a passing grade a possibility. After scoring a 70 on his second midterm in early April, he went to Professor Wooten’s office to plead for mercy. The professor, a distant character in the lecture, was warm and engaging up close. He invited Cedric in and gave him some valuable strategic tips, the sort of thing many other kids know walking in the door.

“Don’t be a lecture-hall stenographer,” he started. Instead, listen and take notes in outline form. The notes should be a guide to reading the thick textbook, highlighting only the sections with ideas mentioned in class. Once that’s all done, carefully read each paragraph in those sections, listing the five key words in each paragraph on a separate study sheet. Use that last sheet for final cramming. Cedric nodded, grateful, and waited for something more. Wooten, like a lot of teachers of large, predominantly freshman, survey courses, is witness to heightened dropout rates for African American students.

Cedric knows such issues of racial attrition are subjects of debate on campus, and he looks intently at the professor, letting the silence hang, hoping for a break. Pass the final, Wooten finally says, and, based on “demonstrated progress,” he’ll pass Cedric in the course.

Running all that over in his head as he listens to the rain, Cedric thinks about how many paragraphs of his psych text he’ll have to annotate and block out for cramming in the middle of next week. He marks it on his desktop calendar mat. He simply must pass.

Finally, there’s the education fieldwork seminar—a ten-page term paper. His performance has been uneven: weak class participation with journal entries from Slater that were often disjointed, full of passionate rambling but little analysis, and the lukewarm B he received on the epic poem. That leaves him with a high C, thus far, a subpar grade for someone who’s considering a double major in education. The final paper counts for 40 percent and could pull him up to a B.

He figures he might as well get started on the paper first and sprints across the campus, leaping puddles, to Rockefeller Library. He settles at a favorite carrel in the bowels of the huge building, an ancient wooden
desk scrawled with clever graffiti, and spreads out three texts from the class alongside his Slater journal. Stacked near the cinder block wall are education texts and selections from library books on reserve.

He knows what he needs to do on this paper, which is supposed to connect the fieldwork with broader issues discussed in the class. He needs to get some distance from the subject, decide matters of context and theme, and then do it all justice with clean prose. He needs to make his points and then back it all up with something other than his personal perspective or experiences. He needs to be an intellectual rather than a preacher.

The library is warm and dry, an ideal place for retreat on a stormy night, and he smells the lemon wax floor polish, citrus clean, trapped in the airless subterrain of stale books and low-slung fluorescent lights. Other kids, all races and creeds, hunch forward in nearby cubbies, intently pressing down on notes and texts, anxious, for sure, but chipping away at their anxiety with steady exertion, just like he is. Cedric flips through a textbook filled with essays and studies about the collisions of race and equal education. Fiery issues he’s lived through, he thinks, but, remember, he’s only one person, one experience. He needs to look beyond himself.

After an hour of skimming and a few pages of notes, he hears a generator kick on somewhere inside the wall, and the passing sensation is like he’s in a greenhouse, with all the potted students in this musty basement, groping just like he is, for the judicious heft of scholars.

He leans back in his chair and thinks back to one day last month, his last day at Slater. He said good-bye to Mr. Fleming, who turned out to be a pretty okay guy after all, and not a bad teacher, despite all the ugly things Cedric wrote in those early journal entries. It’s a bad situation all around at Slater, and Fleming’s gruffness, sometimes playful, sometimes serious, seems to get through to the kids. Cedric remembers he slipped out of the classroom and into the hallway, crowding up between periods as kids bustled toward the cafeteria. He lingered, moving slowly near the lockers so he could watch them all pass, and wondered whether he could pick a young Cedric Jennings out of this crowd. Could anyone? Fact is, there are probably lots of them—kids whose potential, whose spark, gets so dimmed by all the
grime and despair that it’s almost impossible to see. Just a few years, this and high school, when you can get to them, when you can nudge them onto a path that might well determine their course for the next fifty years. Near the exit, a Hispanic kid passed, sort of smiled at Cedric, then disappeared into the flow. No way of knowing, Cedric said to himself. No way of knowing.

He looks at the blank page and starts to write. “The first step is to agree that most people share the goal of true diversity, with many races competing freely and successfully. But everyone wanting the same thing doesn’t tell us ‘how’—how do we get there? How do we lift often poorly educated minorities to an equal footing in the classroom? How do we do this while respecting that being singled out for special attention—and often being ‘tracked’ into a lower educational rung—can result in crippling doubts about one’s abilities?”

He appraises the paragraph and shrugs. Not all that bad. Not inspirational, but the goal here is not conversion. It’s getting an A.

R
ob Burton lies on the couch in the dorm lounge looking at his friend Caroline sprawled on a nearby chair. She’s not his girlfriend. Just a friend who lives on a nearby hallway. She’s petite, a brunette from Massachusetts, and smarter than shit. A girl he can really talk to.

“God, you look terrific, Rob,” she says sarcastic but playful, looking into his bloodshot eyes. “So? Checking into the hospital after this?” He smiles ruefully. It’s May 12, and his heavy schedule of taxing finals—mostly science classes—is almost over. They’ve been bears, biology in particular. His Dickens class turned out to be a bone cruncher as well, with a ten-page paper due yesterday. He’ll be happy to come out with mostly B’s, and at this point he feels like a somnambulist—barely conscious, shuffling across the finish line.

Caroline’s eyes seem smoky, like she’s thinking of something. “You know, Rob, if you and Cedric weren’t roommates, I bet you’d have become friends,” she says thoughtfully. “You’re the kind of person that gets along with anybody.”

He thinks on this a moment and sighs. “It’s hard to think of any of
that now,” he says. “I’m leaving in two days. Whatever might have been, or might be next year, who knows? All I know is things have gotten pretty bad.”

After a springtime of thaw, the last week with Cedric has turned ugly. Rob understands that it’s an odd time as the unit dissolves, as people bump into each other with their glazed “outa here” looks and waxen smiles, and that Cedric, like everyone else, must be feeling a jumble of unruly emotions. But he didn’t expect this—that he and Cedric, after bursts of headway, would slip back into deadlock and silence.

Not that he has time to focus on Cedric’s behavior or much of anything short of that monster chemistry final tomorrow—his last. “Chemistry, my crucible,” he murmurs, sitting up and bidding Caroline a brief adieu. He stops by his room to pick up books and notes for tonight’s big push. The room, it turns out, is empty—Cedric’s side, as usual, neat as a pin; his side, messier than it was a few weeks ago when he gave up efforts at spring cleaning. He throws his tastefully worn canvas bookbag on his unmade bed, checks for e-mail on his laptop, and then realizes he just passed by the sink without bothering to check its current condition.

The sink. It started with Rob shaving his beard last week and not cleaning up the little hairs. He was busy, exhausted. It happens. Cedric’s response: mix in baby powder and Nivea. Rob, a few days later, added chocolate syrup. Cedric countered with hair shaved from his head and some kind of syrup. Each day one or the other adds a little personal marker.

Rob crosses the room and surveys the wreckage. The small, squarish basin might pass for abstract expressionism, Rob thinks, like Pollock or one of those guys, with the patterns of straight and curled hairs swirled under a chocolate glaze with threads of Nivea. It’s a representative work, like he figures art should be, of two people who pass one another without words or eye contact but spend idle hours considering how to display their feelings with, say, a splash of condiment on white porcelain. God, he muses, they think about each other more when they’re not talking than when they are. His mind
wanders to ketchup. Yes, ketchup would be just right, he decides (makes a mental note to snag some little packets at his dinner break tonight), and then makes a beeline for a quiet corner of the library.