A Hope in the Unseen (11 page)

He gets a laugh out of the girl, and he turns as she passes to watch
her walk away. He has at least five minutes before he needs to be in his next class—which he may or may not go to—so he scans the crowd. What next?

At the far end of the hall, he spots his favorite foil opening his locker. Cedric!

Phillip dodges through the crowd currents, shoving the radio in the pocket of his low-riding jeans, and flies by in a twirling leap, snatching a small book off the locker’s top shelf above Cedric’s head.

Cedric spins and slams the locker as Phillip slaloms around clusters of passing students. Cedric tries to follow him. At the end of the hall, Phillip stops, panting, not wanting to navigate the staircase, as Cedric, laughing a little, closes in and grabs him by the shoulder of his black T-shirt.

Leaning against the lockers, they both catch their breath, Cedric holding tight to Phillip’s shirt.

“Hey, give me the book,” Cedric says.

“Why should I?” says Phillip, putting it behind his back. “Say
please
—real nice.”

Cedric tries to reach around but can’t get it, and Phil grabs the front of Cedric’s shirt.

With the two of them only a few inches apart—each holding a handful of shirt—their eyes lock.

“Wouldn’t mind pounding me, would you Cedric?” Phillip says, trying to keep his rising bitterness under control.

“Just give me the book—I’m not playin’,” Cedric says, his voice flat, even, and all business.

It was just a game, thinks Phillip, who was feeling so buoyant a minute ago and doesn’t want this to end with the two of them rolling on the hard linoleum.

Why does Cedric have to make everything so hard, Phillip wonders in frustration as he lets go of Cedric’s shirt and looks down at the bony fist still stretching his T-shirt.

“Hey, chill.” Phillip spits, dropping the book on the floor from behind with one hand and punching Cedric, hard, in the chest with the other.

Cedric winces, letting go of the T-shirt, and Phillip slips away into the crowd, looking back once to see the angular boy in hush puppies quietly pick up his book from the floor.

As the day passes, Phillip’s act sags a bit. His timing is just a little off, and he blames it on his feeling bad about punching Cedric—about letting that whole thing get out of control. In his late afternoon classes he finds himself slipping into a pensiveness that, these days, makes him uncomfortable.

After school, with nowhere special to go, Phil wanders out a side door and settles on the stone steps that overlook the track, where the team is running wind sprints.

Being the class clown allows him to be in control, energized, making them all laugh, setting the tone. But some days—like today—it seems like battery acid leaks out of him, soiling his charming, hip-hop veneer. Punching Cedric like that? It has not been a good day.

Sitting there, grabbing handfuls of pebbles and powdered concrete from a crumbling corner of the steps—no audience in sight—he slips into reflection about what he calls his “double life.”

He does this every couple of weeks. It always means thinking back, if only briefly, to a time three or four years ago when there was a certain coherence to his life at home and at school, a consistency between the goals he publicly embraced and his inner desires, between the outward and the inward.

Back then, he didn’t feel like two people but one: a nerd. Phillip carefully guards his memory of that kid and his life. He wore straight-legged pants and an ironed white shirt, with a bow tie on Sundays. He was a top student who read a lot and would spend hours spinning the globe with his father, thinking about all the places he’d someday go to. Every Saturday, there’d be a morning prayer meeting at the Atkins house in the Highland Dwellings public housing project that would adjourn to the streets, and Phillip and his father would go door to door proselytizing and passing out
The Watch Tower
, hallmark of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Atkinses were a leading family at a local Kingdom Hall, where Phillip’s father, Israel, was a church leader.

All of that is easy to remember, because most of it remains intact.
At home, at least, Phil is still like that, but everywhere else the other Phillip has emerged.

Whenever Phillip thinks about how he’s changed—a gradual process and not all for the worst—he always thinks of how it started one afternoon in the spring of eighth grade. He saw an older boy in the projects—a boy he knew and admired—gunned down right before him. He watched it all from his bedroom window. He thought the shooters saw him. He said nothing but feared retaliation. He didn’t sleep. Police came to the house and interviewed him. That made it even worse, the idea that people in the project, including the shooters, might think he’d been cooperating with the cops.

After that, something was extinguished in Phillip. He began a slow but steady shift in outlook and appearance to creating an identity that he considers a completely sane response. He is now a popular member of Ballou’s mainstream, sporting his tough guy/clown demeanor and a new nickname he recently came up with, “Blunt,” slang for a marijuana cigar. Phillip parties with his buddies on weekends, and his friends lately chide him for having red eyes in school. No matter—he’s rough, he’s fun, and he can walk among almost any group at Ballou. He’s earned himself some comfort and security.

He looks down at the track, at the select group of kids—one of the city’s top track teams—running sprints on the grassy oval. He remembers the look on Cedric’s face after he punched him. Being like Cedric is crazy at a place like Ballou, Phillip thinks. It makes you a target. The kid is asking for it. And, what’s more, Phillip mulls, Cedric is damn lucky it was just me and he
just
got a little punch. Imagine if he’d mixed it up with Head or one of the school’s genuinely tough kids. That’d be that.

He stands up, brushes the grit off his jeans, and looks around. Not much to do. He was talking to a friend not too long ago, and the friend asked what Phillip was thinking about doing, in the future and all. The question kind of stumped him. Of course, there won’t be any college or anything like that. Lately he’s been wondering privately about how he might develop his creative, humorous side, on the way, someday, to trying stand-up comedy; as a fallback, though, he might end up owning
a nightclub or, better yet, a comedy club. But it was hard to explain all that stuff, so Phil went for the easy line, which ended up being truer than he wanted it to be: “All I know is what I do now. I act stupid,” he said. At least he got a laugh.

An hour later, Phillip arrives home—a sparsely furnished four-bedroom ground-floor apartment in Highland Dwellings, a housing project with D.C.’s usual accompaniment of gangs and drugs. He retreats to the room he shares with his older brother, Israel Jr., a brilliant saxophone player who graduated from Ballou last year and is now a cafeteria cook.

This is the site of Phillip’s other life: going to church, passing out
The Watch Tower
in his white starched shirt, and living according to God’s Word. He looks around the room, takes a deep breath—relieved that another confusing day is coming to an end—and flops on the bed, his head next to the open window, feeling the breeze.

Just outside, reclining in a kitchen chair on the apartment’s concrete back patio, Israel Atkins Sr. is talking to an adult friend about the problem of shooting too high. A lyrically articulate man who conducts prayer sessions at his home on weekends, he gives this advice to his eight children: hoping for too much in this world can be dangerous.

“I see so many kids around here who are told they can be anything, who then run into almost inevitable disappointment, and all that hope turns into anger,” he says, catching a few last minutes of sunshine before he goes off to work the night shift cleaning Budget rental cars in downtown D.C. “Next thing, they’re saying, ‘See, I got it anyway—got it my way, by hustling—the fancy car, the cash.’ And then they’re lost.”

Phillip, lying on his bed, half listens. He’s heard this line of preaching before, his father’s “shoot low” philosophy. Life at the Atkins household, like that at the Jennings place, is dominated by faith, and their denomination is also growing wide and strong by pulling converts from more traditional mainstream urban churches. The denominations differ in tiny calibrations of literalism. Jehovah’s Witnesses, using the threat of excommunication, have long stood in opposition to a much longer list of worldly endeavors than the Pentecostals. Jehovah’s, the thinking goes, should have jobs, not careers. Following God’s will is the
career, so attending college, in the view of many witnesses, is a selection of the temporal over the divine. “Set goals so they’re attainable, so you can get some security, I tell my kids,” Israel says to his friend as he rises and prepares to get into his red uniform for work. “Then keep focused on what success is all about: being close to God and appreciating life’s simpler virtues.” He pauses. “Like, take Phillip doing this tap dancing, for instance … ”

Phillip snaps up to lean against the cool plaster wall, his ear a few inches from the window frame. While Israel knows almost nothing of his son’s hip-hop life on weekend nights and in Ballou’s hallways, he recently found out about Phillip’s latest—and maybe last—stab at some form of achievement: tap dancing. For the past couple of months he has been sneaking off to a few after-school practices a week but not telling many of his friends, uncertain whether it fits with his carefully crafted demeanor. Sooner or later, though, his father was bound to find out. Phillip hears the conversation crest forward, with tap dancing mentioned in the same breath as a similar controversy—now ended—over his brother Israel’s sax playing. Israel was called one of the best sax players to ever come out of Ballou when he graduated last year. It seems like a long time ago; Israel barely touches his horn nowadays.

The very idea of a creative career rubs against their father’s sensible “shoot low, simple virtue” philosophy. “Tap dancing, like sax playing, won’t get anyone a steady job,” he says, lingering for a last moment in the sun as he rises from his chair. “Being an entertainer? God almighty. That’s getting on a path to being poor, desperate, and losing your soul!”

The friend laughs, and so does Israel—like it’s some kind of joke—and, inside, Phillip lies back again, pushing his face into the pillow.

One Friday afternoon at the beginning of April, Phillip slips into Ballou’s empty auditorium, where a small group of kids is waiting on the stage. Over the next hour, Phil reviews and rereviews a complex choreography, a dress rehearsal for the next day’s long-awaited show. He moves masterfully through a sequence of fifty-three different steps, slides, and spins. The dance teacher applauds zestily as he finishes, and Phil, a blush appearing on his light skin, indulges a bow.

The next day, a sunny Washington Saturday, the Kennedy Center
auditorium comes alive with a wailing jazz number. Phillip and four other dancers spin and tap their way flawlessly through a complicated routine. The audience—about two hundred parents, brothers, and sisters of performers—applauds wildly.

After the show, in which three other ensembles also performed tap routines, all the kids slip through a stage door to an adjacent dressing area. Phil is practically airborne, laughing and strutting in his yellow “Ballou Soul Tappers” T-shirt. A few teachers from the school came, and one is carrying a video camera, taping the kids as they whoop and embrace in the afterglow.

“Hey, over here,” Phil yells, and the camera wheels around. “I’d like to thank a lot of people … this honor really belongs to them ….” He’s off into high gear, jumping voices—first an aw-shucks Elvis, then Eddie Murphy’s white guy accent, then a dead-on Richard Pryor nasal-speak, his body all twisting at the waist, hips out, a Pryor move. “And remember, all you kids out there,” he riffs in a voice now closing in on his own, “you are our future, you can be anything you want, you can go anywhere your heart leads you.”

The camera goes off. He hugs a girl from the troupe, and then a guy, and then isn’t sure where to go. He stands in the middle of the chaos of kids, all grabbing gym bags, changing shirts, flashing Polaroids and hugging some more. He just watches, not wanting it to end.

During the show he was craning to catch a glimpse of his parents. All that was visible on the other side of the footlights, though, were rows of silhouettes. His dad, always punctual, probably got his family here early, so they probably got something near the front. He wondered what the old man’s reaction would be. The songs included a few old jazz and blues numbers that his dad might recognize from what Israel calls his “confused, younger days,” when even he “had some trouble dealing with what was expected of me by God.”

The kids spill from the dressing area into one of the Kennedy Center’s Oz-like foyers—lit up by incredibly high, arched windows—where the parents patiently wait to rejoice.

Phil casually scans the thick, regal red carpeting.

“You seen my people?” he asks one of his fellow tappers.

“No, haven’t,” she says.

“Your people here?” he asks, tentatively.

“Sure, my mom’s over there,” the girl says, pointing.

His throat seems to catch. He shakes his head. He looks again across the crowd, now clustering into families and beginning to drift toward the elevators. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll find out where they are, why they couldn’t come.” He tries to force a smile, but, for the first time, he can’t seem to manage it. “I’ll find out later.”

C
edric Jennings, at sixteen and three-quarters, has decided that he’s been unnaturally focused and narrowly driven in the last couple of years, and definitely in the last couple of months.

And what better time to explore what’s natural and innate and waiting to emerge than in springtime, the season so suited to adolescence. Most kids his age have an impulse to try on new poses and voices to see what feels right, but for Cedric it comes as a modest awakening.

Not much about him has changed, outwardly. At the start of April, with no word still from MIT, he’s just spending a lot of time walking around with a glower, feeling particularly edgy and thinking a lot about how to alter people’s reaction to him—looking to “get to them” before they get to him.