A Hope in the Unseen (55 page)

Cedric nods, surprised that hearing what he’d hoped to hear would feel like a kick in the chest. Long wants him to stay for the service, but Cedric—feeling like he wants to think over what the Bishop said—murmurs something noncommittal and then goes home.

On Sunday, he rises early and leaves the house. Barbara sleeps in, not going to Sunday worship—something she almost never misses. It’s just as well, Cedric thinks. He feels a little uncomfortable about going to church, anyhow, and not having her with him makes it easier. He feels like he ought to show up to at least let Long know that he hasn’t simply fled, that he’ll be coming once in a while.

He gets to the church twenty minutes early. A few people are straggling in and offer their greetings as they make their way to the
pews to chat quietly in clusters. Cedric, propping up a wall, sees one of his special people, Gloria Hobbs, the woman who first brought his mother to this church and one of Barbara’s oldest friends. A moment later, they hug and slip into a long, empty row.

“I’m worried about my ma, that she’s feeling bad and she just won’t let anyone help her,” Cedric says after a while.

“Oh, she’s strong as she could be,” Gloria replies. Cedric then mentions the chest pains and, to show just how worried he is, tells Gloria how he gets up every night to check if she’s all right. He didn’t want to mention that last part. “You won’t tell her that I’m getting up or anything,” he quickly adds, and Gloria, her features darkening with concern, assures him that she won’t.

Early that morning, about three o’clock, he rises in the darkness and pads out to the living room. It’s almost a full moon, and he easily sees Barbara’s silhouette on the couch. Edging up close, he bends low and hears her soft breathing, making sure that it’s regular and easy. Most nights, he gets quickly back to bed, but tonight he lingers, sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor. She looks fresh and young in the pale light, almost girlish, a soft-cheeked face that makes his anger feel misplaced. For so long, he thinks, he needed something to push against, to push himself forward. Except
she’s
not something to rise above and leave behind. She’s what got him this far. Give, give, give, her whole life, mostly to him, is part of what’s left her hollowed out like this. But a person needs to learn how to receive once in a while. Yes, that’s something she needs to learn. He silently uncoils to stand, reaches for the edge of her blanket, tangled near her waist, and pulls it gently to her shoulder.

A few evenings later, Cedric comes across his grade sheet sitting under a magazine on his night table and then roots around the apartment, looking for the pad on which he wrote down all the summer numbers from Brown. Maybe he’ll call Zayd or maybe Chiniqua, just to talk. Sure, they’d talk about grades, but mostly he just wants to hear their voices. He’s thought a lot about Brown lately and about his desire to get back to Providence. He figures that maybe next summer he’ll just stay up there, get an apartment, a job, take some classes.

When he finally finds the pad, it’s too late to call. He retires to his room, figuring he’ll make calls tomorrow from the free phone at work. It’s Thursday night, and he hears the door shut as Barbara comes back from prayer meeting. He doesn’t hear anything for a moment but senses her presence in the hallway.

“Lavar? Are you ready to talk?” she says, standing in his doorway. Her voice is soft.

“I talked to Gloria tonight,” she says, barely audible, as he pushes aside a magazine he was reading in bed and stands up. “You know, I don’t want you to worry. I’m gonna be fine. I’m gonna take care of me now.”

He steps a few feet toward her and sees that her eyes are moist. He wants to get the words out quickly, before he feels overwhelmed. He does, telling her, “You can’t be the only one doing the caring. I’m strong enough to do some now, too.”

It’s the only thing he says before they embrace, all the tension of the past month, of not knowing how they ought to be with one another, spilling out in tears. His long arms squeeze tight around her, a big woman who doesn’t need to be so damn big anymore.

I
n the fall of 1997, Cedric Jennings started his junior year at Brown University with a B average. He wasn’t, quite yet, just another student passing through an Ivy League college. But, with each passing month, he grows closer to feeling inconspicuous at Brown and at once-foreign ports of American life.

Along the way, there have been a few stumbles on grades and episodes of social uncertainty, but they lack the intensity and confusion of the first year’s treacherous encounters with the unfamiliar. Now in the winter of 1998, he is past that, and each time, it gets a little easier to hoist—or discard—baggage from his past and figure out a way to move forward.

It is a particularly long journey from one edge of America to the other these days, and a passage few can manage. For many of Cedric’s peers at Ballou High School, there has been, sadly, little forward motion. Phillip Atkins still works in the mailroom of the newsletter company in Bethesda, Maryland, and doesn’t think much about being a dancer or comic anymore. LaTisha Williams dropped out of UDC, bumped along through office support jobs, and joined a small, virulently fundamentalist church whose preacher sometimes screams on street corners. Recently, she said she discovered that “who I was before no longer exists,” and quit her job to sell M&Ms on the sidewalk—50 cents a bag—to support her church. James Davis dropped out of Florida A&M at the end of his freshman year and was already on the streets of Southeast, dealing drugs, the following summer when another dealer robbed him and shot him in the leg. Despite police pressure, he refused
to press charges against the shooter and, three months later, his brother, Jack, was arrested for murdering the rival in a hail of gunfire. In October 1997, Jack was found not guilty of the murder, a verdict that, among other things, rested on the confusion by various prosecution witnesses about which of the identical twins may have fired the shots. Cedric hears about such matters in passing, third hand. He rarely speaks to kids from Ballou.

Cedric Gilliam, in accordance with his parole, entered an intensive drug treatment program the day after he and his son met in prison. He stayed there for a year, living at a halfway house near the Capitol, getting therapy, and eventually working as a counselor to other drug addicts. It seems to have worked. By New Year’s of 1998 he is still drug free, living with his mother, Maggie, in her house or with Sherene, who has stuck by him. He talks to his son from time to time, mostly over the phone, and both are attentive to avoid tearing a veneer of respectfulness that is allowing their relationship to evolve slowly. Not that it has been easy. As Cedric Sr. watches his son meet successive challenges, he plods along—unhirable after two decades of incarceration—cutting a head or two a day and rooting around for something to do.

Barbara Jennings, meanwhile, has managed to keep herself busy. Standing in the ruins of her near eviction, she said it was time to take care of herself, to do something other than martyr her life to Cedric’s escape and success. It just took a while for her to back up those words. Ten months later, facing yawning debts that included Neddy’s loan for the back rent, she was evicted. This time no one came. She quietly moved back to 15th Street, to an upstairs room in the old clapboard house, completing an odd life cycle that seemed to produce a fresh start. Living there almost free, she has since paid off nearly two-thirds of $11,000 in debts, including some old medical bills that have trailed her for years. Last summer, she began taking classes at Scripture Cathedral and attending meetings for single adults organized by Bishop Long. For her refuge and sustenance, Barbara still relies on the church, which continues to grow. (Bishop Long, meanwhile, continues to save souls and he recently upgraded to a Rolls-Royce.) Even though they’ve walked several steps down diverging paths, Barbara and Cedric talk
regularly. They often spend holidays and vacations together, and they have enjoyed each others’ company by ignoring long-standing issues of obligation and sacrifice.

As for the students in Unit 15 at Brown University, the last year and a half has flowed downstream along the predictable, lazy current of college life. Rob Burton became a peer counselor, joined a fraternity, and is majoring in marine biology and English. Cedric and Rob did in fact become friends early in their sophomore year. They met and chatted and eventually were able to laugh about the Jackson Pollock sink and much of what was roiling them in room 216. Zayd Dohrn continued to thrive at Brown and went abroad to Oxford for his junior year, e-mailing his friend, Cedric, many times to fill him in on the latest chapter in his unfolding adventures.

Though he has white friends, Cedric has spent the past year and a half mostly socializing with black students at Brown. He regularly visits Harambee House, where Chiniqua lives, and sometimes hangs out with a few middle-class black guys he sees around the campus. In the spring of his sophomore year, he began dating Nicole Brown, a tall, lithe girl from northern Virginia, who is a forward on Brown’s basketball team. They’ve continued to see each other since then.

The more things Cedric tries, the more things he is able to try. Certainly, he sometimes has to outwork the competition in his classes—play a little catch-up—but he’s used to that. A building of skills in writing and clear thinking has allowed him to better handle work in education, history, philosophy, and African American studies classes. His major, meanwhile, is in applied math, a concentration that deals with the tangible applications of theorems, the type of high-utility area with which he has always been most comfortable.

Subtly, almost without notice, the passing days bring him self-knowledge, which is what all the lecturing, note-taking, testing, and endless intervening hours are really about anyway. He still hears the echo from rutted Southeast Washington and presses through gusts of thankfulness and survivor’s guilt to figure out why he escaped when so many—who are so much like him—did not. As he searches and learns more in classes and discussions about the country’s immigrant past, the phrase “a hope in the unseen” continues to resonate. That’s the thing,
he figures, that built the country, that drew often luckless people across oceans to a place they could barely imagine. He knows it is what propelled him from one country to another—even though he is anything but an immigrant, and even though these are anything but hopeful days for most African Americans. Nonetheless, the fact remains; he had hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of “you can’t” or “you won’t” or “why bother.” More than anything else, mustering that faith, on cue, is what separated him from his peers, and distinguishes him from so many people in these literal, sophisticated times. It has made all the difference.

But such contemplations are, increasingly, just that: things he can mull over on rainy afternoons and then step away from to consider. Recently, on one such rainy afternoon, Cedric sat killing time at his clerical job in the Brown admissions office—one of several part-time jobs he’s taken at Brown to supplement Donald Korb’s $200 a month. Drumming the desktop with a pencil, he thought about his classes, girls, CDs he’d like to buy, and some modest plans for next semester. Things are so easy up here, he mused, looking out at the tended lawns and ancient trees on College Hill, so many avenues to choose from, every path cushioned. And that notion about ease swiftly drew its opposite, a passing recollection of his days worrying about gangs and guns, walking through garbage, keeping his head low. He snorted out a laugh. It’s weird, he decided, but there is something about those days—the intensity of them, eyes watching him pass, always being alert or, to unearth an old phrase, having “something to push against”—that he misses. He nodded once and casually gathered up his things to go. An absence for sure, Cedric Jennings concluded, but one he can easily live with.

W
hile working as a
Wall Street Journal
reporter in 1994, I met a top student at a blighted Washington, D.C., high school who was “too proud” for his own good. That’s what the school’s principal told me. I decided to figure out precisely what he meant.

That was nearly four years ago. The student was a gangly sixteen-year-old named Cedric Jennings, and within a few months the
Journal
featured Cedric in a pair of long stories. During the last two and a half years, while reporting and writing this book, my aim has been to see America through Cedric’s eyes.

At the outset, the project presented serious challenges. The notion of a white person trying to understand what a black person might see is increasingly considered a fool’s errand. In the current parlance of racial coding and group identity, it’s assumed there’s simply no way a white guy can “get it.”

I hope this book will go some distance toward refuting that. After years of effort, I know there are volumes of insight I will never approach about being black in America. Yet I have been fortunate. Because Cedric and his mother, Barbara, graciously opened their lives to my prodding and nagging questions—allowing me to witness their days unfolding, for better or for worse—they’ve allowed me to gain a genuine, heartfelt understanding of their lives. They are my friends, partners, and confidants in this project. Barbara says it was a “blessed day” that Cedric and I met at Ballou. I agree and tell her the Hebrew word is
mitzvah
. I will be forever grateful for their trust in me and in
the ideal that racial distinctions can be bridged by shared understanding.

I hope readers of this book will adopt that ideal as well. After the stories about Cedric appeared in the
Journal
in 1994, I received calls from several black newspaper reporters who, eventually, got around to asking me their real question … “Are you black?” I considered the query a sign that I had briefly crossed a divide. It is my hope that this book will similarly confuse dug-in racial expectations and, in some small way, help weave the black experience and white experience—so commonly seen as parallel threads—into a shared national narrative.