A Hope in the Unseen (37 page)

“Are you satisfied with this?” she asks after reading it.

“Naw. Not really. It doesn’t say what I want real well,” he mumbles.

“Well, it’s really not too bad,” she says. She’s heard from Donald that his writing has moved from abysmal to poor and she figures he must have been working furiously on prose since he arrived.

She begins reading the paper aloud in the reedy, Hepburnish voice of a diction coach, picking up a few grammatical errors, tense changes, and some sentences that need reworking. The paper is only two pages, and she soon crests toward the end. Wright’s main character, Reverend Taylor, brings the short story to a climax when he leads a march of blacks and whites through a small town.

Cedric, having been fed a rich brew of Martin Luther King integrationism by Barbara since birth, responds to the story’s finale in a heartfelt way.

“‘When Wright wrote this,’” Helaine reads from Cedric’s conclusion, “‘the idea of strong whites and strong blacks, marching side by side, was wildly implausible. The story is intended to be inspirational, like a dream of what could be.’”

She pauses, letting that last, moving line seep in. “Cedric, I think that’s a nice paper.”

He laughs like he’s embarrassed, but she detects that it’s really relief. They work over some changes she’s noted along the way, and then she says, emphatically, “Show me another!”

He pulls out the big midterm paper for History of Education. She asks who his professor is. “James,” he tells her.

“Oh yes, he’s very good,” she says, and again reads it to herself and then aloud. The assignment is to elucidate and analyze your “family educational tree.”

She immediately sees that this gives Cedric another sterling opportunity to write passionately—to simply write what he feels. He opens with the journey north by his grandparents, who, Helaine reads aloud, “‘thought little about education. Marriage and having a family were enough. In 1940, my grandparents were united in holy matrimony. From this union there were ten children, five girls and five boys. With only a third grade and grade school education, respectively, Grampy and Granny had nothing to offer their ten children but God, love, and a roof over their head.

“‘At sixteen, my mother got pregnant with my older sister, Nanette Jennings,’” she reads aloud. “‘The pregnancy came at a crucial time in her life. She was beginning to get her life together and realize her dreams. Education was her only way out. When the teachers and principal at her school found out she was pregnant, they forbade her to come back. They thought that it was a disgrace and that she was setting a poor example for the other students. So she dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year and ended up on welfare.

“‘At twenty-five, she got pregnant again with my other sister, Leslie Jennings. This time she made up her mind to go back to school. During this time, high school graduates were the only recipients of decent jobs.’”

“Cedric, you can make it tighter by cutting, ‘During this time,’” Helaine says, crossing out that phrase.

“Okay, then,” he says.

“‘She was going to do whatever it took to take good care of her children. After six months she earned her GED. This opened up many doors for her to gain work in the government. After passing the civil service test, she received work at the General Accounting Office.

“‘At this time, my sisters were well into grade school. That’s when she began dating my father. Cedric Gilliam was a guy from around the neighborhood. He was very intelligent. In addition to graduating from high school, he has a bachelor’s degree in urban studies, business management, and ecological studies from the University of the District of Columbia.’”

Cedric begins to laugh, high-pitched and nervous. Helaine looks back down at the page.

“‘He had also been incarcerated for narcotics distribution and armed robbery. That was not smart,’” she reads, dispassionately.

“That was crazy,” Cedric blurts out. “Right?”

It’s a tragic story, and she feels his embarrassment.

“Yes, Cedric, that was crazy,” she says, softly.

“‘In 1977, I was born. My father was long gone and my mother was left with a broken heart.’”

Helaine stops reading. Her detachment has dissolved. She glances up at him, but he’s already staring at the blank white wall, looking a little flushed. She takes a deep breath and pushes on.

“‘In search for strength and restoration, she attended a revival meeting. It was there that she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior. She then became actively involved in church activities. Because of her strong interest in God and the way she lived, I was imparted with the same beliefs. She is a social missionary and sings in the choir. Even if I had not been interested in church, she would have still made me participate. My Christian heritage and education go hand and hand.’”

“That should be ‘hand in hand,’” she says quickly, not wanting to stop the flow of her reading.

“‘I was always taught in church that education is the way. My pastor would always say, people fail because of a lack of knowledge. This knowledge included God’s world and important information that can help anyone better society. I consider myself blessed because, between me and my sisters, I am the first to graduate from high school and go on to college …. I thank God for giving me a mother who could give me discipline and at the same time help me find answers to my dreams.’”

Helaine places the paper on the desk, cocks her head, and squints at him.

“This is a beautiful paper. Yes, there are a few problems, grammatical things, some sentence structure, some punctuation, but, on balance, it’s very strong and compelling.”

“You really think so?” Cedric asks. “You really do, don’t you?”

Helaine helps him rewrite a few awkward sentences and sets up a time for next week. In a moment, he’s out the door and rushing off to dinner.

Later that night, while she’s loading the dishwasher in her kitchen and her husband is upstairs in the third-floor study with his econometric tomes, she turns Cedric’s two papers over in her head.

She realizes it will be difficult to keep her distance from this one. She recalls a phrase from the first paper—“a dream of what could be”—and smiles. In the second, he gave all credit to his mother’s discipline and the transforming qualities of faith, which is something most kids would feel self-conscious writing about. It’s exciting to work with a kid who is so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying. While it’s not going to be easy to get him to where he needs to be academically, Cedric simply can’t afford to fail. He’s got everything—God, mother, faith—riding on making it. The thought makes her short of breath.

No, those papers weren’t the type of smart, dispassionate exposition he’ll need to excel, not the kind of collegiate prose that attaches carefully qualified examples to broad principles. Yet, because Helaine is granted access to the shadowy realm of how professors actually grade papers, she knows a secret, and it offers her some conditional hope. Affirmative action can be subtly woven into grading. Cedric will get good marks on both papers because he found a way to squeeze his inspirational feelings into each assignment. To mark him down would be to mark him down as a person.

While the more typical Brown students will need to master the models for smooth explication and elegant grammar to excel, Cedric can ride on his strong and unique “personal perspective.” A tale of overcoming oppression sells here and almost everywhere.

She turns out the kitchen light, grabs a handful of papers from other students that she’ll review in bed, and begins to ascend the steps. No, in future classes on more diverse and unfamiliar subjects, Cedric’s advantage will certainly decrease, she decides. At least for now, though, he’s been able to find ways to rely on his bursting heart.

A
n addendum is needed to the music rules. An exception, really. Both Rob and Cedric know this, but they’ve held out, not sure how to bring it up. The problem is bladder size. If one of them leaves the room to go to the bathroom, he risks losing music control. So, one evening in the second week of November, with Sting’s “Fields of Gold” quietly playing, Rob brings it up, and they quickly agree that bathroom runs don’t count.

On the rainy afternoon of November 14, Cedric wanders back to the room after finishing his Richard Wright class, visiting the science library, and running a few errands. He throws his bookbag on the desk and flops onto his bed, his head near the TV.

Cedric’s face becomes hard and tight, like a death mask, when he glances at Rob. Phillip and any number of kids who taunted him through Ballou’s hallways left their scars. He knows that, just as he knows that those days are slipping further into memory. But Rob seems to be picking at the scars, even though his white, doctor’s son demeanor couldn’t be further from that of tormentors of the past who were always in his face.

Rob just ignores him. And that seems, somehow, worse. There he is, just sitting on his bed doing a chemistry homework sheet and listening to REM, the Georgia rockers on
his own
CD player.

A week ago, Cedric took his CD player from the trunk in the middle of the room and set it up on a shelf over his bed. He mumbled that Rob’s “side of the room” was “such a disaster that the stereo could get broken over in all that mess.”

Rob didn’t argue. He went home that weekend to the large colonial in Marblehead and brought back two stereos, one for his side of the room and another he can carry to the lounge or wherever he pleases.
With that act, Rob completed a division of property, of once shared items that included Rob’s hair clippers and the phone (Rob now makes and receives calls from friends’ rooms).

But they can’t go back to being strangers.

Cedric looks at his watch, five o’clock on the nose. He turns on the TV. Much of his free time is spent in front of the tube. The P.T. Barnum—I like talk shows—at their lurid peak in the fall of 1995—are a staple. He has first-name relationships, sometimes admiring, sometimes acrid, with Oprah, his favorite, and also with Montel, Sally, Jenny, Richard, Gordon, Jerry, Tempest, and Ricki, whom he now flips to.

“Cedric, could you turn it down a little,” Rob says, not looking up from the chemistry worksheet resting on his legs. Cedric turns it down a barely discernible notch.

Rob leaves the room for a moment and leaves his music on. Cedric assumes it falls under the bathroom exception, though Rob didn’t abide by subprovisions about notification. Cedric takes advantage of this gray area and momentarily turns up his beloved Sony Trinitron. Rob returns, notices the amplified TV, and turns his stereo up a few clicks as he passes it on the way back to bed.

Cedric, his ear practically against the screen, turns the TV up a tad to compete with Rob. Rob gets up and turns his stereo even louder.

Cedric looks up. Rob, nonconfrontational to the last, is already back on his bed, as though nothing has happened. Like Cedric is invisible or something. He purses his lips.

The volume knob on the TV goes to full blast. Ricki’s whining voice blares across the open air. The agile Rob leaps up and cranks his stereo to pain-decibel levels.

The Trinitron can’t compete, but Cedric knows what can. He jumps to his feet and flips on his stereo, blasting a local hip-hop radio station. LL Cool J’s “Hey Lover” overwhelms REM’s “Losing My Religion.”

The walls are shaking as the two boys stare at each other, wide-eyed and stunned.

Rob busts into the hall and disappears, while Cedric, shaken, flees for the peer counselor’s room.

Cedric is fortunate to find Rachel Edy sitting at her desk. She’s
called “Rock” by Unit 15ers and is the most respected of the East Andrews counselors. Rachel is solid and attentive, a natural listener. She knows that penetrating a roommate dispute is roughly equivalent to getting inside a failed marriage: next to impossible.

But some matters need to be dealt with immediately. And they are. She and Cedric talk late into the night. And a week later, Cedric has
New York Undercover
, a Fox TV favorite starring a black detective, cranked to a healthy volume. Rob hums contentedly on his bed, wearing $100 earphones.

A
s the end of November nears, Zayd is busy. A racy script he wrote in intermediate playwriting drew raves, and he’s been telling people that a pretty brunette junior in the class “made it known that she’s available.” Then, there are the ongoing social demands of “Bear’s posse,” a group of sophomores who hang around Bear and are always itching for adventure. Beyond that, there’s professor Bernard Reginster, the youngish, Belgian philosophy professor who wears black boots, black jeans, and stylish little octagonal bifocals. Zayd (like most everyone in the three-hundred-seat lecture hall for Existentialism) thinks Reginster is about the coolest human being anywhere. He’s trying to figure out a way to bump into him somewhere, in a real casual way, and talk about philosophy.

Still, there’s time to knock once in a while on the door of room 216 and pull Cedric out. “Come on, C,” Zayd says on a chilly Sunday night a few days before Thanksgiving break. “Let’s get off College Hill and hit a mall.”

Bear and his white 1992 Chevy Blazer are otherwise occupied, so they catch a ride with another friend. Zayd is in the back seat, humming along to “Gangster’s Paradise,” the new hit by Coolio. Cedric bobs along to the rapper with Medusa-like hair.

“You ever think about things you went through when you were little?” Cedric offers, head nodding to the beat.

Zayd loves it when Cedric asks innocent questions like that; they draw out memories or feelings that Zayd has shelved as unsophisticated.

“Sure, all the time,” says Zayd. He spins into stories about when he
lived on 127th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in upper Manhattan around the time his parents were coming out of hiding. His mom had been arrested for suspicion of having some involvement in the Brinks truck robbery in Nyack, New York, where two cops and a security guard were killed. Mostly, it was just that she was friendly from her revolutionary days with Kathy Boudin, a radical who’d been involved in the robbery. Bernadine was released after a year without charges—not long after she did an exclusive interview with Phil Donahue from her jail cell—and she and his dad started on the path to getting the credentials that would ultimately serve them well in the years to come. But it was a slow start. They lived in a gritty apartment, and Zayd was one of the only white kids at a tough P.S. on the edge of Harlem. He tells Cedric he was “thoroughly trashed by this kid who was two years older than me, a black kid who was huge. And I remember when it came time to move up to fourth grade and about half the class was held back, and he was one of them, I was so happy.”