A Hope in the Unseen (6 page)

By this reckoning, Cedric Lavar Jennings wasn’t so lucky. Despite Barbara’s best efforts, he was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and reactions leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities.

From the start, Cedric received a steady diet of uncertainty and upheaval. He and Barbara moved around a lot. There were too many stops to remember as they bounced from tiny, short-term rentals to pullout couches or bedrolls at one of Barbara’s sisters’ apartments. But at least they were together. Barbara’s third big decision (after vowing to call him Lavar and to frequent the church) was to quit her secretary’s job and go on welfare. Her son had just turned two. She had been made a junior missionary at the church, and being with her Lavar in these crucial years (“when,” as she’d often say, “a child either gets the love he needs or he doesn’t”) was part of a reordering of her priorities. They lived frugally. The girls were in school, and Barbara and Lavar took buses to thrift shops in low-rent strip malls. She’d buy him books there and sometimes clothing. She’d prowl through the racks while he played with the secondhand toys. She bought cards with colors and numbers and they’d sit while she flashed the cards and drilled him. They visited museums and the Anacostia library. Countless hours were spent at the church. There were plenty of women around—between Barbara’s sisters and Scripture’s missionary ladies—and young Lavar was the pride of a matriarchy.

This sheltered, early period, though, was bound to be short lived. Just after Cedric’s fifth birthday, Barbara knew she’d have to start building his defenses. He would start a full day of kindergarten in the fall, and she would go back to work. But before that, there were things Barbara wanted him to know.

They were living in Northeast on a busy python of traffic and
noise, Benning Road, just over a dry cleaners. It was 1982, and cocaine dealers were discovering the potency of a new concoction they called rock (later, crack), and dealers were beginning to use small children to make deliveries.

One day in late August, after Cedric and Barbara trolled a few thrift stores, they began walking the streets on all sides of the apartment. Barbara spoke to Cedric in careful, measured words. “You’re gonna be a big kindergartner next week. And I got to be going back to get a job, when you’re at school. Now, walking back from school, I don’t want you to be talking to anyone, understand?”

He nodded, picking up on her seriousness. Then she squatted next to him, so their faces were side by side, and she pointed across the street. “See that man over there?” she said firmly. “He’s a drug dealer. He sometimes asks kids to do things. Don’t ever talk to him. He’s a friend of the devil.” Block by block, corner by corner they went, until she’d pointed out every drug dealer for five blocks in either direction. Later that night, she slowly explained the daily drill. After school, he would walk by himself to the apartment, double lock the door, and immediately call her—the number would be taped by the phone. And, along the way, he would talk to no one.

The first day of school arrived. She’d bought him an outfit specially for the day: blue slacks and a white shirt. She walked him over to Henry T. Blow Elementary, which was just behind their apartment.

“Here, I got something for you.” She took from her purse a fake gold chain with a key on the end and put it around his neck.

“This, so you won’t lose it.”

“Ma,” he said, already conscious of his appearance, “can I wear it underneath?”

She nodded, and he slipped it inside the crew neck of his white shirt. Years later, he would recall that dangling key—the metal cold against his smooth chest—and think ruefully about how exhilarating it felt: a first, cool breeze of freedom.

By that afternoon, he was a little man, walking purposefully across the playground and around the block to the apartment, unlocking and then locking the door, calling his mother to say he was all right. She started a new job as a data input clerk at the Department of Agriculture,
and soon Cedric knew the phone number by heart. It was a ritual he’d repeat almost every day—double locking the door of this apartment or that—for nearly a decade.

And one other thing changed. The birth certificate that was required to enroll him in school listed his full name. He might be Lavar at home and at church, but now he was Cedric Jennings at school. “Saydric … Seeeedric … Cedric,” he’d say over and over, sitting alone in the apartment after school, watching afternoon reruns of
I Love Lucy
or
The Brady Bunch
or
All in the Family
. The name felt odd, like a bad fit, and he’d often wonder why his mother chose it.

He was Barbara’s little partner, sticking close to the trinity of school, church, and the locked apartment, trying—with sterling behavior and glowing notes from his teachers—to keep her from worrying all the time. Once, when his half-sister Leslie was baby-sitting, she had taken Cedric with her to visit her boyfriend down the street. As Leslie dragged him home later, having lost track of time, she whined, “God, hurry up Lavar. Ma’ll be back soon.” Suddenly, they were caught by a frightening specter: a nearly maniacal Barbara, wild-eyed, switch in hand, who snatched Leslie in midstride and snapped the switch across her face. Terrified, Cedric began to scream. His mother’s continuous apprehension—and attacks, like that night, of genuine panic—left Cedric certain there was danger everywhere.

When Leslie and Nanette had gone off to live with relatives, Barbara and Cedric left the apartment on Benning Road to live with her sister Rose “Tiny” Jennings. One Friday night in the early spring of 1985, the phone rang at their apartment.

“For you, Barbara,” Tiny called to her sister, “It’s some guy.” The two-bedroom apartment—shared by Barbara, her sister, Cedric, and his two cousins—was small, and Barbara got quickly to the phone.

“Ummmm. Barbara? This is Cedric. Cedric Gilliam. I was wondering if I can see the boy.”

“What’s the occasion?” she asked coolly, not skipping a beat. He explained that word of his fatherhood had gotten out—the one girlfriend of his who knew told another one who didn’t. “So what’s the point of hiding it? And, you know, I’d like to know him.”

The next morning, Barbara sat Cedric down, turned off his cartoons, and explained that his father was coming. The child, just seven years old, was beside himself with joy.

That day, Cedric Sr. took his son to the beautiful two-bedroom apartment he shared with a woman named Joyce, who seemed like a wife. There was the closet full of suits, the giant TV, the stereo, and the still plush green Cordoba. They had lunch and went to K-mart, where he bought his son a Bugs Bunny costume, with Halloween coming soon. The child wore it to bed that night and under his Sunday best the next day to church.

There were a few other visits. Barbara would always be there when Cedric got home, seeming more anxious than ever. To calm her, Cedric told her of everything he and his father talked about and of all those silky possessions.

Walking amid the plenty in his father’s apartment one Saturday, Cedric saw a pewter mug full of coins. He poured them into his pocket and later told his mother they were a gift. In fact, they were rare coins that a desperate customer had bartered in exchange for heroin. At the next week’s visit, Cedric Jr. walked into an ambush when his father, a lifelong thief, determined he would teach his newfound son a lesson about stealing. The boy was made to strip, and the whipping with a thick leather belt was ferocious, halted only when Joyce finally grabbed Gilliam’s arm and screamed for him to stop.

Cedric had now learned about betrayal and misplaced trust. And, a few weeks later, about abandonment. Cedric Gilliam was picked up for heroin dealing and armed robbery. He disappeared for a term of twelve to thirty-six years into Lorton Correctional Institution, the D.C. Federal prison in northern Virginia.

The shocks kept coming to his son, fast and steady. Barbara, concerned about both the risks Cedric faced in their treacherous neighborhood and the effects of his father’s beating, mustered a furious run at a better life for them both. She used all of her money to rent a four-bedroom apartment in grassy, suburban Landover, Maryland, a working-class area just across the District line. Neddy and Leslie, now teenagers, returned home. Cedric had his own bedroom, played in the
complex’s landscaped courtyard with other children, and attended a mostly white elementary school, where his studiousness and good manners quickly ingratiated him to his teachers. The furniture was from Rent-a-Center.

The apartment was far beyond Barbara’s minimum-wage means, and six months later the eviction crew arrived. All of it ended up on the street, picked over and hauled off by neighbors. Everything vanished, except maybe the psychological scar left on Cedric while he sat on the stoop and cried, watching as kids divvied up his beloved He-Man action figure collection.

More apartments and more evictions followed for mother and son before a move back to the dreaded house on 15th Street. They made another move to a tiny apartment in a building that caught on fire while Cedric was home alone. Then finally they landed on V Street, Southeast, in a tiny, dank, one-bedroom near some of the city’s worst drug dealing. Always careful not to part the curtains more than a crack, Cedric would watch the dealers, guns sometimes visible, stash drugs in the alley beneath his window.

Any parent surveying this wreckage would have been dispirited, and Barbara no doubt was. Everyone of every age in this neighborhood ingested gut-churning dread regularly. Gunshots. Arrests. Sirens all night. The chances of a boy emerging from here intact were almost nil. In desperation, Barbara tried to keep a tight grip on just the basics: strong physical discipline and tight scheduling. She made sure her son was either in school, in the locked apartment, or at church, visiting Scripture Cathedral four times a week.

One Sunday, Barbara was, as usual, down in the church basement, cooking the congregation’s dinner, to be served after the midday service. It allowed her to get a meal for nothing, rather than paying $3, and to slip a free one to Cedric.

One of the missionary ladies ran down to the kitchen. “Your baby is singing—front of everyone.”

“What?” Barbara screamed, dropping the fried chicken tin and running upstairs.

The children’s choir, about fifty strong, had been singing, with
Cedric in his usual role anchoring a clutch of boy tenors, when something seemed to well up inside him and he suddenly stepped forward.

“He will never leave me or forsake me,” Cedric sang, his voice rising above the others. “Please don’t let them hurt your children. Oh, God, please don’t let them hurt your children.”

Watching this drama of the spirit, the crowd yelped with joy. “Do it! Sing it!” someone cried out.

Barbara heard the cheers as she bounded up the stairs toward the sanctuary, wiping her hands on her skirt as she ran.

“Please don’t let them hurt your children,” he sang out, growing, with each verse, more comfortable in front of the crowd. “Please, ooooh please, Jesus, don’t let them hurt your children.” His mother, bursting through the rear doors a moment too late, heard only the applause.

After this breakthrough, Cedric seemed to nudge himself along. He learned to talk about Cedric Gilliam without getting upset, and, with Cedric Sr. safely in jail, Barbara felt freer to be candid about all that had gone sour in his father’s life. Soon enough, she became convinced that such knowledge actually motivated her son, only a fourth grader, to live in reaction to his father, using Cedric Gilliam’s rutted path to find coordinates for an opposing course he would carve.

For both mother and son, one thing was certain: at the darkest moments, there was always the sanctuary of Scripture Cathedral. Like for so many inner-city blacks who left mainstream churches for Pentecostal congregations in the 1970s and 1980s (making it the fastest-growing denomination in the country), Scripture Cathedral offered Cedric and Barbara neat designations of good and evil and strict rules forbidding even common activities, like watching movies or dressing provocatively. For Barbara, who, like so many, came to fervent Pentecostalism from a life broken by poverty and neglect, the church provided both moral orderliness and an absolution for past failures that finally allowed her peace about all that had gone wrong over the years. Here, success was not an honor, nor privation a dishonor; the Lord assiduously threw up tests and kept score based solely on faith. Bishop Long, in his sermons, railed against the sins of pride and ambition.

Yet one meritocracy was permitted: music. That was the path Cedric stumbled onto. Those who could sanctify God with their sweet or strong voices—a dozen adults and half that many children—were permitted a special place, front and center. Cedric became a youthful star of the children’s choir, a soloist. Where so much about life at Scripture Cathedral, indeed, meant a withdrawal from this world, the confidence infused in a young boy, standing before six hundred or so parishioners on a Sunday, was a single, buoying item an eleven-year-old Cedric, as a fifth grader, could carry beyond the church’s walls.

At this age, Cedric aimed to please. He did his chores, which were many, with Barbara often telling him that she’d done her share when she was a kid and he would do his share. And he was obedient. Having felt Barbara’s wrath, he took seriously when she’d warn, “I tell you once. I don’t tell you twice.” By sixth grade, he was a skinny, earnest, straight arrow, a little taller than the other kids and mostly quiet—waiting to be noticed.

Then came a victory: acceptance into Jefferson Junior High School, a magnet junior high, an anointed place. Jefferson was the type of school that had sprouted from the urban landscape in the past few decades like a flower, nourished by the rich decay and detritus all around. One out of every twenty or so sixth-grade applicants made it in. Three years later, most of those students managed to be accepted into one of the District’s few top magnet high schools, which in turn sent almost all their graduates to college.