A Hope in the Unseen (3 page)

Cedric huddles against the cloudy plastic window of the bus stop hut and watches the drug dealers near the intersection at 8 th Street. He wonders what draws him out to the avenue bus stop, where—God knows—he could get killed. People do, all the time; he muses today, as he often does when he stands at this stop, about whether coming out here means he’s going a little crazy.

Two crack dealers are chatting about twenty feet away. Both guys are in their early twenties, with hair mottled from being outside all day—one in a fine-looking long-sleeve Redskins football jersey and the
other in a soft leather jacket. Cedric cranes his head around the hut’s aluminum edge to pick up the conversation. He’s sure they’re armed, and he spots telltale bulges on each with his trained eye.

“So, you see, this bitch, she sucked my dick just to get her a little rock,” says the Redskins jersey.

“Hey, next time you send her to me,” says the soft leather, throwing his head back in a toothless laugh. “I’ll give her what she needs real bad.”

Cedric listens, not breathing, and then pulls back behind the plastic wall just as the one in leather turns toward him.

Hidden behind the bus shelter, he replays the dialogue in his head, where he will continue to chew on it for days afterward. He smells the rich greasy aroma of Popeye’s Fried Chicken wafting from across the street, hears a saxophonist just up the boulevard, playing for quarters. A few guys he recognizes from Ballou, including some crew members, wander into view and he watches them flirt—or “kick some game”—with two cute girls who are rolling their eyes but definitely not walking away.

Spending so much time alone, he finds it hard to resist observing the fiery action all around. No diving in, not for him, not ever, but what’s the harm in watching a little, picking up bits of this or that? He spots the bus a few blocks down. Clenching his molars to flex muscle at the bend of his still smooth, boyish jaw, he steps out into the wind.

A
partment 307 on the third floor of the blond brick High View apartments at 1635 V Street, Southeast, is empty, dark, and warm at 6:04
P.M.
, when Cedric unlocks the door. There hasn’t always been heat, with overdue bills and whatnot, and he always appreciates the warmth, especially after the long walk from the Anacostia bus and subway station in the icy dusk wind.

He slips out of his coat and backpack and goes from room to room turning on lights, something he’s done since he was a small kid, coming home alone to apartments and tiptoeing, with a lump in his throat, to check if intruders were lurking inside closets and under beds.

It’s not a very big place—two bedrooms, a small bathroom, a kitchenette,
and an attached living and dining room—but it’s one of the better apartments that he and his mother, Barbara, have lived in. He’s even got his own bedroom in the far back corner.

He flips on the switch. It’s like a bear’s winter cave of strewn matter—a thick padding of clothes, magazines, rubber-soled shoes, books, loose papers, and more clothes.

Cedric turns on his beloved Sony Trinitron, a 19-inch color TV that his mother rented for him in ninth grade from a nearby Rent-a-Center (just paid off a month ago at an astonishing total price of nearly $1,500) and flops onto the bed. Like his proclivity for spying on street hustlers, the TV is a vital element of Cedric’s secondhand life. He loves the tube, especially the racy, exhibitionist afternoon talk shows, which he watches for a few minutes tonight before turning to the local news—the lead story about a shooting not far from here—and then flipping to
The Flintstones
, a favorite.

He hears the thump of a door slamming.

“Lavar, you home?” comes the voice—calling him, as his mother always has, by his middle name—but he doesn’t get up, figuring she’ll wander back. In a moment, Barbara Jennings, hands on hips, is standing in the doorway.

In the sixteen and a half years since Cedric’s birth, Barbara Jennings has been on a path of sacrifice and piety that has taken her far from the light-hearted haughtiness of her earlier self—the woman with a blonde wig, leather miniskirt, white knee-high boots, and a taste for malt liquor. Cedric has seen pictures of that skinny young thing, a striking girl with a quick smile who, as he has discerned from his mother’s infrequent recollections, searched for love and found mostly trouble.

She stopped searching long ago. Barbara is a churchwoman now. On weekdays she works in a data input job at the Department of Agriculture, where she has been for almost eleven years, and splits the rest of her time between a church in a rough section of Washington north of the Capitol dome and this small, messy apartment.

Cedric looks her up and down and smiles thinly. Today, like most days, she has opted for a black dress and sensible shoes, an outfit most appropriate to her general mood, needs, and heavier frame. But her
features—her smallish nose and pretty, wide-set eyes—have held up well, even at forty-seven and without makeup.

“I thought you would have made dinner by now,” she says, slipping a thin chain with her dangling Department of Agriculture photo ID from around her neck. “How long you been home?”

“Only a couple of minutes,” Cedric says, turning back to the tube. “What we got to eat?”

“I don’t know, whatever’s in there,” she says curtly before disappearing into her room to change out of her work clothes. Taking his cue, Cedric moves into the kitchen and begins breaking up ground beef into a frying pan. He pours in a can of navy beans, some oil, chopped onions, some pepper, salt, a little paprika, and other condiments. He does this without complaint or enthusiasm—it’s what he does most nights—and soon there are two heaping plates of steaming hash.

“Hey, it’s ready and all,” he calls around a short breakwall behind the stove to Barbara, who’s sitting in a bathrobe on the white living room couch watching TV.

Usually, he takes his plate to his room and she eats on the low, wide living room coffee table—each sitting in front of their own TV. Tonight, though, she clears away newspapers and unopened bills from the dining room table.

“I haven’t talked to you in ages, it seems,” she says softly as they sit down to eat.

“I’ve been around,” he says, grateful for her attentions. “Just been a lot going on—at school and whatever.”

So it ends up being a night that they talk. It happens every couple of weeks. It’s not needed more than that, Cedric figures. He knows that his mom wants to give him his space, now that he’s sixteen and, by his reckoning, almost grown up, so she doesn’t bother him in his room, where he spends most of his time. Maybe too much time, she tells him sometimes, but it’s the only place he feels he has any privacy. After all, it’s not as if he goes out late on weekend nights with friends, like most kids at school. Inside his room is the only place he can really relax.

He describes last week’s assembly, about his not going, and she
shakes her head dismissively. “What did I tell you? Before you know it, you’ll be leaving them all behind. Just pay them no mind.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, “but what if I get rejected by MIT? That’d kill me.” Barbara heeds this more carefully. It was she, after all, who found a description of the program in a scholarship book that someone gave to her at the office.

“You can’t be worrying about MIT, Lavar. Just pray about it. If God has meant it to happen, it will.” She looks up between bites and sees he’s not convinced. “Look, your grades are perfect, your recommendations are good. What can they not like?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he concedes.

“What’s the point of getting down on yourself?” she says. “People will see that you’re special.”

He nods, letting her words sink in, and they eat for a while in silence—just the two of them, the way it has been for years. Barbara’s two older girls, Cedric’s half-sisters, are twenty-six and thirty-one and long gone, leaving mother and son to rely on each other in more ways than they can count.

Through years of ups and downs—times when he was certain that he was unworthy of success or love or any reasonable hope of getting something better—her faith in him has been his savior. It always amazes him. Having finished dinner quickly, he watches her clean her plate contentedly, and he shakes his head. She’s just rock solid certain that he’s going to MIT. Who knows, he wonders as he busses their plates and begins washing the dishes. Maybe she’s right.

Both return to their customary evening routines—Barbara back to the couch and her sitcoms while Cedric dries and puts away the dishes and silverware. Quieter now, with the sink water not running, he hears what sounds like pops from outside, almost certainly gunshots. He looks over at his mother sitting by the window but she doesn’t react, so he begins wiping down the kitchen counters.

Gunshots are part of the background score here. Listen on most nights and a few pops are audible. The corner nearest the house—16th and V—is among the worst half-dozen or so spots in the city for crack cocaine dealing. The corner a block north—16th and U—is, of late,
the very worst. There has been lots of shooting on both corners recently, but still they’re open all night, and the traffic of buyers on 16th remains strong and steady in all weather.

Cedric knows that the surrounding mayhem is not something he and his mother need to talk much about. Still, it’s always there, ionizing the air in the apartment, lending it some extra gravity, which, Cedric told his mother a couple of weeks ago, gives him “a little something to push against.”

Cedric hangs up the wet dish towel on a drawer handle and strides toward the short hallway leading to his room. He glances quickly at Barbara as he passes and realizes that the TV is on but she’s no longer watching it. Her eyes are on him.

He stops. “What you looking at?”

She pauses as though she’s trying to remember something. “What did I once tell you?” she asks finally, in a tentative voice.

“Ma, what are you talking about, talking crazy?”

“What did I once tell you, Lavar?”

“I don’t know. You tell me lots of things.”

She stands, tying her robe closed, and slowly points a finger at him, buying an extra moment to get the words from Scripture just so: “The race,” she says with a satisfied smile, “goes not to the swift nor the strong, but he who endureth until the end.”

Oh yes, that’s a good one, Cedric agrees, and nods. Hasn’t heard that one in a while. “Thank you, Jesus,” he says to her with a wry smile as he makes his way toward the back bedroom. Stopping at the threshold, he turns and calls back: “But it wouldn’t be so terrible to be all swift and strong—just once in a while—and let some other people do all the enduring.”

Barbara, sunk back into the couch, can’t help but laugh.

A
TTENTION, STUDENTS. WE ARE IN CODE BLUE.”

Cedric Jennings gazes at the silvery mesh intercom speaker above the blackboard in Advanced Physics. Images of tumult form in his head.

“REPEAT. IT’S A CODE BLUE!” barks the scratchy voice of the assistant principal, Reggie Ballard. “EVERYONE SHOULD BE WHERE THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE … OR ELSE.”

Through the open door to the physics classroom, the sounds of frenzy become audible for Cedric and fifteen other math/science students. The rules of this game are simple: anyone in the halls during a “code blue”—called from time to time when students are supposed to be settled into class after a period change—is hauled to the cafeteria and cataloged for after-school detention. With the warning duly issued, ten security guards with walkie-talkies—large black men in plain clothes—fan out through the halls, grabbing students by the collars and sleeves.

Everyone in physics sits still, ears perked up, as light footsteps tap down the hallway of the school’s science wing, followed by heavy slaps on linoleum and then a shout from the nearby stairwell: “DAMN YOU, LET GO OF MY CLOTHES!”

It’s an unseasonably warm day in early March, a day to make one think that spring is already here. It’s also one of those bad days at Ballou, when anarchy is loosed and it suddenly becomes clear to kids, teachers, and administrators—all at once—that no one is even remotely in charge. Some random event tends to trigger it. Early this morning, for instance, a teacher got punched by a student and bled. The news traveled, and other kids, looking for any excuse to blow, were emboldened.

At a few minutes after 10
A.M.
, there was a fire in the downstairs bathroom, forcing everyone out into the parking lot as four fire trucks arrived to drench a flaming bathroom trash can. Afterward, kids milled about the halls, and two separate scuffles ignited on different corners of the first floor. Security crews moved to one but neglected the other, and a social studies teacher—a large, heavily built man—jumped in to break it up. He avoided injury, other than getting his glasses knocked across the hall.

Like other students, Cedric kept himself apprised of the morning’s commotion, but he had other business to occupy him. Before physics—as Ballard was consulting with Washington about preparations for calling the code blue—Cedric sauntered into the administration office and
leaned against the chest-high Formica counter. He spotted the assistant principal and started right in. “Hey, Mr. Ballard. Look, Mr. Dorosti gave me a B+ on the midterm in computer science and I deserved an A, and I’ve got all my weekly quizzes to back it up,” Cedric said, trying to give a little bass to his voice. “He can’t mark something I did as correct on a quiz and then mark the same thing wrong on a test—right?”

“I guess not,” Ballard replied. “Bring me what you’ve got and I’ll take it under advisement.”

“You better, and Mr. Dorosti better, ’cause I’m fighting this one.”

As Cedric turned to stalk out, Ballard whispered to Washington, “That Cedric … nothing but trouble. Quick tongue and too proud.”

Pride. Cedric’s 4.02 grade point average virtually ties him for first in the junior class with a quiet, studious girl named LaCountiss Spinner. Pride in such accomplishment is acceptable behavior for sterling students at high schools across the land, but at Ballou and other urban schools like it, something else is at work. Educators have even coined a phrase for it. They call it the crab/bucket syndrome: when one crab tries to climb from the bucket, the others pull it back down. The forces dragging students toward failure—especially those who have crawled farthest up the side—flow through every corner of the school. Inside the bucket, there is little chance of escape.