A Hope in the Unseen (58 page)

After a bit, a youngish woman rose tentatively. She had a question, but she held the microphone for a moment before she was able to speak. “Ms. Jennings, I live not far from where you raised Cedric, right off of Good Hope Road. Last week, my nine-year-old son saw someone shot on the street right in front of him. And he’s acting very different now. And he won’t talk about it. And I just need to know everything you know, right this minute.”

The collisions that are so much a part of Washington—of so many single mothers who work for the public’s good by day and cross town to a landscape of neglect by night—shattered the afternoon’s good cheer. Barbara thought for a moment and then spoke softly. “You need to find a way to make him feel comfortable talking to you—to let him know that’s the best thing he can do, and that it’s not burdening you for him to tell you what’s in his heart. And when he talks, just listen, and don’t tell him anything. I know that’s hard. Because we as moms are so anxious, and there’s so much they need to know. But, first, you have to listen for a long time.”

Afterward, as the round luncheon tables emptied, a mob surrounded Barbara—women with a lifetime of urgent questions, certain that this quiet, firm woman, with her hard-earned insights, had the answers.

T
wo months later, in mid-April 2001, I was sitting next to Cedric in a pew of New Bethel Baptist Church, an old brick church not far from Scripture Cathedral. It was a Saturday morning, and the church was crowded. Their honored deacon, Clarence Taylor, had died.

Along with his role as Cedric’s chemistry teacher and mentor, Clarence was a key member of New Bethel and the Washington religious community. Various middleweight preachers showed up to eulogize him, led by the church’s eloquent head pastor, Walter Fauntroy, a longtime aide to Dr. Martin Luther King and a Congressional representative from the District for twenty years.

As one speaker after another hailed Clarence’s life, Cedric leaned in close and said, “I’m so nervous I can’t breathe.” It was Clarence himself who set up this final test for his old student. The previous week, Clarence had had a dream. He told his wife, Sandra, that he would die in a few days and started to pack up his belongings. He gave her instructions about his funeral. Most notably, Cedric would have to give one of the eulogies. The request was non-negotiable. Clarence, who’d had a long history of heart problems, died on the day he’d predicted—Tuesday, April 17, 2001—of heart failure.

And now, Cedric’s name was being called. In a moment, he was before the audience, frozen, reading a few prepared remarks. He stopped. Looked down at the casket, at the foot of the stage, and up at a thousand eyes, everyone knowing who he was, and who Clarence was to him. “Lots of times he’d say things to me and I’d say, ‘Mr. Taylor, I have no idea what you’re talking about!’” The room erupted in laughter—no easy feat at a moment like this, with a fifty-one-year-old man cut down in life’s prime. But everyone here, including some former students, knew of Clarence’s famously elliptical queries, his winding citations of Scripture, his penchant for answering a simple question with a more complex one. Then, Cedric stopped and looked into the middle distance, as though he was seeing the two of them in the chemistry classroom. “Well, he’d answer me, he’d say, ‘Cedric, let me give you a clue.’”

The room was still. “And that’s what he’s doing right now. He’s giving us a clue, all of us, about how to live a holy life walking in the light of God … ” And then Cedric preached about the magic of the divine word, as the audience sat rapt and wept and professional preachers from the stage knew they’d been bested. After countless hours of give and take between Cedric and Clarence, filling long afternoons in the chemistry classroom of a forgotten school, this was a final moment of call and response. The teacher now gone; the pupil rising to teach. As the casket was lifted, the choir sang Hymn 189, “When peace like a river, attendeth my way … ,” and Cedric could all but hear Clarence’s voice.

Cedric at that point was working at MicroStrategy, Inc., a northern Virginia data mining company that was hiring even after the Internet boom had turned to bust. Cedric was in a department that trained new workers. The company spent lavishly. A basket of fruit and chocolates came the day he accepted the job the previous fall. The annual corporate retreat was held on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Cedric, though, had been moving toward other priorities. He had been chatting with Clarence and some of his favorite teachers over the winter, and was thinking more about a career in some branch of education. He sent off a few applications. A few weeks after Clarence’s funeral, MicroStrategy, facing problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission, began to collapse. In one day, the company laid off nearly a third of its employees—and Cedric got a pink slip. The next day, he received another letter—a thick envelope of acceptance from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

S
tudents come in countless varieties, but college life is almost always the same. Those familiar reference points—all-nighters, pizza deliveries, imperious professors, hours of idle (though not pointless) chitchat—are part of the American educational package and would again define Cedric’s life. At Harvard’s school of education, he kept mostly to himself and strived to keep a low profile, slipping into the mix of the other students. “I just wanted to be judged on what kind of work I did, not what people felt from the book,” he told me. It was largely a
successful effort. At one point, in the second semester of Harvard’s one year master’s program, a professor teaching urban education threw up a slide of “A Hope in the Unseen” and mentioned some lessons drawn from the book. “I understand the protagonist is not doing very well,” the professor said, grimly. “I’ve heard he’s working at the GAP in Providence.” One student cut him off. “Excuse me, Professor—actually he’s a student here at the Graduate School.” The professor was stunned. Cedric made himself known a few months later, when he graduated with a 3.7 grade point average.

At that point, he started speaking ten or fifteen times a year to high schools, colleges, or educational groups for modest fees. The Harvard credential provided a measure of instant, convenient credibility; he could speak about his personal experiences and segue into educational theory and practice. The combination of speaking gigs and graduate degrees—funded by more student loans—was a natural fit. But it wasn’t a career. He wanted more hands-on training in the kind of work, he said, that made him “feel like I was actually helping people.”

Soon, he was at the University of Michigan, getting another master’s degree—this one in social work—with a plan to eventually use those classes and credits toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, a particularly strong suit at Michigan.

Years before, as he prepared to leave Brown and met with Clarence Thomas, the Justice warned Cedric that he could never go home again but might not be accepted up ahead, that he could end up “caught between worlds.” He said that might leave Cedric angry and frustrated. Cedric said he wouldn’t end up that way.

What he has managed, instead, is a sort of straddle, a foot in each world. At Michigan, Cedric didn’t live in progressive, tony Ann Arbor, where he thought the people were “snooty and pretentious,” but instead in Ypsilanti, a lower middle class, mostly black community about 20 minutes off campus. His apartment complex, called “Lake in the Woods,” was sometimes called “Lake in the Hood.” Cedric loved that. By day, he’d work the hallowed corridors of higher education. By night, he’d slip out of Ann Arbor, for that town’s opposite number. “It’s safe here,” he told me one night in a phone call, just before he received his master’s in social work in December 2003. “It’s just people’s
impressions that say otherwise—people who only see what’s on the surface. This place feels like home to me. And that feels like what I need.”

M
ost lives follow the well-trodden path of growth and maturation and decline. But
where
they proceed creates distinctions of endless variety. A society’s shared principles—like equal opportunity and justice, the value of each individual—are tested against these distinctions. What makes Cedric’s cross-border journey so bracing is precisely the gap between how lives unfold in two very different countries he has inhabited, both called America.

Ballou High School does not keep reliable records about its graduates. Of the class of 1995, about two-thirds of those who made it to senior year graduated. A few dozen went to college, many of them to junior or community colleges, or the University of the District of Columbia, or UDC, which accepts any graduate of a D.C. high school.

Some students in the class also ended up in various realms of “the system”—the catchall term for incarceration, probation, parole, or police custody. Delante Coleman, who ran the Trenton Park Crew, was arrested several times over the coming years—in 1999, for possession of marijuana and PCP, and carrying a handgun; and in 2002, for assault during a fight with the mother of his child—but never convicted. James and Jack Davis, after various scrapes with the law, were arrested in 2003, charged with multiple counts of drug conspiracy, and placed in the D.C. Jail. James—who mounted a vigorous legal defense—was acquitted in May of 2004; Jack was convicted in November of drug conspiracy and a gun violation. He’s awaiting sentencing.

The outcomes for most graduates of Ballou is more pedestrian. They ended up in the bottom rungs of the economy—the lower middle class, working poor, the underemployed. With the education they were able to get in high school, the options are limited. Their fortunes are more in line with LaTisha Williams, who, as of two years ago, was working as a waitress at a Fridays Restaurant in Washington. She had lost weight and was no longer selling M&Ms on the street for a storefront
fundamentalist church, the point at which she was last noted in the book’s narrative.

Next to Cedric, the character from Ballou who has drawn the most attention—and follow-up questions about his status—is Phillip Atkins. Phillip has come to represent that vast community of those left behind: a student who is as capable as Cedric, but makes life choices that are understandably guided by self-preservation on a dangerous terrain. He says, in essence, that his posture as a tough clown, and his nickname of “blunt”—slang for a marijuana cigar—are the sane responses to his environment. At graduation, the loudest applause was for Phil, though the codes of conduct at Ballou meant he had to trade a great deal for his popularity.

But, as this book shows, Phillip—a Jehovah’s Witness—emerged from a family with a particularly fierce work ethic. The Monday after Friday’s graduation, Phillip began working in the mailroom at United Communications Group, a newsletter and data analysis company in Bethesda, Maryland. UCG’s owners had launched a “dreamers” program several years before: 62 kids randomly selected from the sixth-grade class at Johnson Junior High would receive full college tuition and costs if they made it post—secondary education. Phillip was one of those sixth graders.

When I visited the company in late 2004, Bruce Levinson, one of UCG’s owners, told me that, thirteen years hence, seven of the 62 made it through some form of college—five of them girls.

But Phillip, he said, was “doing better than almost any kid in the entire group—he’s a great guy, a real success.”

Then we rode the elevator to Phil’s floor.

I hadn’t seen him in eight years. Where he was once light-footed, with a dancer’s body, he’s now more of a halfback, a thick-shouldered, twenty-eight-year-old man with glasses. But the smile is the same, and the laugh. He’s been at the company almost eleven years, the first five in the mailroom.

When last we spoke, about two years after Ballou’s graduation, Phillip said that “we busted on Cedric for the choices he made, but now some of us wish we’d made some of the same choices he did.”

But Phillip was never one to fret over “what ifs”—and, over the years, he’s gone about the business of becoming a grown-up with clear-eyed ardor. A few years ago, before he was due to be married, he said he “wanted more out of life than being in the mailroom … I was about to be a husband, I knew I needed to step up.” During his years delivering the mail, his buoyant personality made him friends throughout the thousand-employee company. One of them tipped him off about an administrative opening in a division that collects and distributes telecom pricing data to clients. Phillip applied, and got the nod, but first had to master an intensive six-month course in working the company’s complex computer systems. It was pure, hard brain work—one of the first instances where Phil had to apply himself in this way—but he managed it. Now, six years later, he is firmly in middle management—helping to operate this business line, selling telecom data, and starting to move into sales.

As we sat at his desk, piled with account data, Phil talked about his father’s “aim low” philosophy, discouraging his talented sons from thinking about college, or creative careers, in favor of solid, reliable work that pays the bills. “It was hard to swallow back then, but it taught us that work itself was something that was good and valuable. And he didn’t give us choice. You dream on your own time.”