A Hope in the Unseen (8 page)

When he first started waking in the darkness at the beginning of March, he discovered that sunrise is the best time to pump himself up like this. Marching through the eerie silence of V Street, cutting through the long shadows and wedges of morning sunlight, he feels heroic.

He hits the corner of 16th and V—as always, open for business.

“What’s up?” Cedric barks. The drug dealers—one guy in his late teens, the other in his thirties—shake their heads and kind of chuckle. They see him every morning. He usually just hurries by.

“He sure is ‘all that’ today,” one of them says to the other, plenty loud, so that Cedric nods an acknowledgment as he passes.

At 7:15, the only sounds echoing down the first-floor hallway of Ballou are those of the tapping keys from the computer lab, where Cedric is already at work.

Later this morning, he will work on his school science fair project, an assessment of the growth rates of hydroponic plants. He plans to research another science experiment—a chemical analysis of acid rain on monuments—after school, to be entered in a citywide science fair competition sponsored in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last year, he won third prize for a project on asbestos hazards.

With his whole day mapped out, Cedric leans into the computer like it’s a bobsled.

“You sure are making me get here early these days,” says Mr. Govan from across the room. He runs the computer lab and opens it up before classes begin, mostly for Cedric.

“It’s the only way I’ll be able to compete with kids from other, harder schools,” says Cedric, defining a block of text from one screen and moving it to another. “I mean, what choice do I really have?”

This is Cedric’s standard line—he’s been saying it as a sort of half-apology since he arrived in ninth grade and realized that with so little work being done during class time, extra-credit projects would be crucial to learning anything. Today, though, he enunciates the words with a measured clarity, like he’s addressing an audience. For now, the convenient
aphorism “kids from other, harder schools” is metamorphosing into real flesh and bone. He’ll be hearing from MIT any week now. As he sees it, it will be those kids or him. Lately, he’s managed to conjure them up and hate them. He doesn’t analyze what he’s doing, but he knows it’s working.

Among other things, it crowds out a vision that drove him all but crazy: the look on some MIT professor’s face when he sees Cedric’s abysmal score of 75 out of a possible 160 on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT. He tortured himself for a week with this one—various Ivy League faces staring in horror at his application. One was an old, venerable white-haired guy with bifocals, another was some young brilliant Jewish guy, like one of the teachers he had at Jefferson. Cedric panicked on the PSAT last fall. So much was riding on it. He pumped himself up too much, and, racing through, not considering the questions carefully, he had lost track of how much time he had. Then he went back to recheck answers and started erasing some ovals right before time ran out. It was a nightmare. His PSAT score is equivalent to a 750 on the SATs out of a possible 1600, which would put him in the bottom third percentage of test takers.

That was then. He’s past all that now, no longer dwelling on his fear. He gets up from the computer and moves like a missile through the crowded hallway to first period. His mother’s right—what’s the point of getting down on himself and his prospects?

As he considers what his hated competitors—those smart black and Hispanic applicants from much better schools—are up to each day, the daily curriculum at Ballou looks increasingly like a thin academic soup. Cedric’s response is to eat every lesson plan in sight. He’s wrecking the curve in Unified Math II, piling on answers to problems he knows cold, making sure he always gets the A+. In physics, he’s extended his lead over LaCountiss in accumulated points, though she probably has the greater gift for science.

By offering some competition to keep Cedric’s edge, the morning’s regimen of math and science can funnel his up-at-dawn enthusiasm. But come midday when math/science kids must start to mix with the rest of the student body for other subjects, there’s simply nothing to push against. Passing grades are granted for just showing up.

Cedric settles into a chair for history class. Tired and graying, Mrs. Mildred “Midge” McBriarity is one of about 40 percent of the teachers at Ballou who are white. There are twenty desks; the class roster lists as many kids who should be here. The starting bell rang more than ten minutes ago, but only Cedric and one other boy are present.

“All right,” she says finally. “Our reading for today was about Calvin Coolidge and the coming Depression.” She continues, “Were the 1920s a period of true intellectualism, or was it just a facade of intellectualism?”

Cedric raises his hand. She looks up and hesitates, as though there are many to choose from.

“Ummm. Let’s see … Cedric?”

“What’s a facade?”

“It’s a fake front, a veneer of some kind, maybe of, for example, sophistication. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, facade, okay …. It was, you know, also a time of materialism,” he says, ducking the trickier subject of intellectualism.

“That’s right. And how, Cedric, did that materialism manifest itself?”

“With get-rich-quick ideas.”

“Right,” she adds. “In the stock market, they bought stocks on margin. Do you know what that is?

“Buying something?”

“Well, sort of,” she says, skipping past that.

As the class discussion limps forward, Cedric finds it hard to remember what he felt like at dawn. In his afternoon classes—Government, SAT prep, and Spanish—he is often the only student to have completed homework. The classes are often nearly empty, especially as the days grow warmer, and he is left to learn in this awkward question-and-response style across a sea of unoccupied desks. Most of the time, he’s simply reciting, calling out a subject heading from the text or a worksheet. He knows he’s not developing the analytical skills that come from complex class discussions and thoughtful reasoning.

A few hours later, after the day’s dismissal bell rings, he files into Mr. Taylor’s empty room behind Tanya Parker, a skinny, shy math/science
classmate, and the ever present LaTisha. They chat about some great Timberland boots Cedric saw in a magazine, a kid who punched a teacher, and a math/science classmate of theirs—a C student—who is now living at a homeless shelter.

While Cedric remains guarded about discussing his application to MIT (fearing, already, the ridicule if he’s rejected) he begins to talk around it, near it, mentioning how, someday, he’d like to go to “some Ivy League or whatever.”

LaTisha and Tanya both balk. LaTisha says she’s planning to go to the University of the District of Columbia, or UDC, a middling, financially troubled school that accepts almost any graduate of a D.C. public high school. Tanya is not certain. She adjusts her eyeglasses and says, “I’ll probably go local.”

Cedric tries to explain. “It’s just that I’ve sacrificed so much. You know, giving over my whole life to schoolwork and then just going to UDC. I mean, come on now. I’d get laughed at.”

LaTisha smirks. “You don’t even know where some of those Ivy schools are at,” she says. “All those Yales and things. You ain’t been there.”

“I know where they are,” Cedric counters, tentatively. From the corner of his eye, he sees Mr. Taylor move from the adjacent lab area into the connecting doorway, eavesdropping.

“Yeah, where Harvard at … huh?” LaTisha probes.

“It’s, you know, in Boston,” says Cedric.

“Ivy League?” she says with a flourish. “Why do you want to go so far away from here, somewhere you ain’t even seen?” LaTisha keeps on him, talking faster now. “See, what kind of fool spends his life trying to go somewhere he ain’t even seen or has no idea about. Damn, you may not even like it. Then what? Your life be ruined.”

Mr. Taylor’s shoe taps the linoleum, and LaTisha turns. “Oh, hi, Mr. Taylor,” she says, all effervescence. As the afternoon wanes, she and the silent Tanya take off for a 4:30 city bus. Cedric, brow furrowed, stays behind.

Mr. Taylor shuffles some papers on the lab table at the front of the room, waiting for the boy to speak.

“I saw you listening,” Cedric says.

Mr. Taylor saunters around the desk, his dusty black wing tips squeaking.

“You didn’t have much to say to LaTisha,” he says. “What about all that?”

“I could never dream about, like going to UDC or Howard, or Maryland or wherever,” Cedric says. “It just wouldn’t be worth what I’ve been through.”

Mr. Taylor nods and oomphs his body into the desk chair next to Cedric, like he’s squeezing into a tuba. “I know there are people you want to prove things to,” he tells the boy in a confidential whisper.

“NO, NO,” Cedric shakes his head. “Don’t go there. It’s not that.” But Mr. Taylor presses forward. “It’s all right to feel like you want to show people, so long as that’s not all you want, so long as you don’t think that will really change anything. Proving things to the other kids or, let’s say, to your father, won’t make them like you or apologize to you. It won’t make them cheer you on.”

Mr. Taylor rises with a groan, cleans a few worksheets off the wide black-slate windowsill, and folds shut his grade book, glancing over once as Cedric mulls over his last offering.

Cedric looks at the teacher for a moment. The mention of Cedric Gilliam, always a lurking presence in his son’s life but rarely spoken of, pricks at Cedric’s rage, as well as his furious drive for acceptance. He knows it but backs away from it. He’s not going to get into a long discussion about his father, not today. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, rising from the desk, gathering his things. “You know about all that already, me wanting my father to love me or whatever. I hear you. But I want to make it to MIT or wherever for me, too. I know it’s crazy, but I believe that’s where I belong, even if they’re places I haven’t really seen.”

Mr. Taylor smiles, all Cheshire cat now, rocking back on his heels. And Cedric immediately guesses where the teacher’s mind is racing. Incoming Scripture.

“Oh God, what now?” Cedric says, grabbing his bookbag, shaking his head with a there-you-go-again grin.

“Hebrews 11:1,” says Mr. Taylor. “The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.”

“NO. Wrong—you messed it!” Cedric laughs. “It goes: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Man, Mr. Taylor, you always getting ‘em wrong.”

Mr. Taylor howls. “All right, extra point for you,” but, as usual, he wrestles the boy back to middle ground, thwarting an outright victory. “The Word, of course, is the Word my young friend. But make it into what’s right for you. That’s the lesson for today. Take from the Holy Scripture only what you need, nothing more.”

Cedric looks quizzically at Mr. Taylor. “You always be talking in riddles,” he says with a chuckle and waves farewell as he strolls by. What, he wonders, did all that mean—take from Scripture only what you need? Maybe, he wonders, passing through the doorway, it means deciding on a few lessons from Scripture you can really use, day to day, and holding tight to them. Everyone’s life is different, after all, and everyone hears the Word a little differently.

Then he turns the botched line over in his head and hears his giggle echo through the empty hallway. A hope in the unseen. Sort of a pocket-sized version of the original, and not really a religious phrase, he decides, but one you can definitely take with you.

T
he Bluebird, a squat diesel bus custom-painted the cobalt blue and eggshell white of the U.S. Marshall’s service, idles just inside the barbed-wire gates of Lorton Correctional Institution, waiting for the morning’s cargo.

A hundred yards away, inside a long, low mess hall, Cedric Gilliam looks disdainfully at the steam trays of corned beef hash before sliding forward his Styrofoam tray for a ladleful. At 4:45
A.M.
, on the edge of northern Virginia’s suburbs, the minimum security section of Lorton’s sprawling, 10,100-prisoner complex in the grassy Blue Ridge foothills is in a half-conscious state. Literally. About half this facility’s 930 inmates are here for breakfast in their pale-blue cotton two-piecers, most of them planning to return to bed once their bellies are full.

Like every morning these days, Cedric Gilliam sits quietly at a four-man table, picking at his food and savoring a faint scent of privilege. Everyone knows the score: he’s one of about three dozen guys dressed
in jeans and casual shirts who will soon be transported by the Bluebird through the curling thicket of barbed wire to work/release jobs in Washington. But now that Cedric is entering the eighth month of his gig cutting hair at a barbershop in Northeast D.C., most of the “first time in a long time” moments are long past—like his first big-screen movie (sixth day out), his first lay (that same afternoon), and his first reunion with his mom’s home cooking.

Not that each dawn to dusk of freedom—following eight long years of captivity—isn’t vivid and invigorating. It is. Each moment. Full of temptations, too, which are steadily eroding his initial resolution to follow the rules. No surprises there. He has recently convinced himself that it’s natural for any man to partake of some things he’s so long been denied and that it’s the smart man who can be careful about it.

He slides the barely touched plate of hash into the dishwashing window, nodding a perfunctory greeting to a rubber-gloved inmate pulling early duty. Then he snakes through a few hallways and stops to check out at a guard booth near the doorway to the parking lot.

It’s a forty-five-minute ride due east to a drop-off point near Union Station, a quick ten minutes on the subway, and a two-block walk that lands him at an apartment just across the Maryland line as morning breaks.

“You’re nothing if not punctual,” says Leona, opening the door. She’s an attractive, high-cheekboned woman of forty-six, two years his senior, whom he’s dated on and off since the mid-1970s when he was juggling her, Barbara Jennings, and another woman while living with a fourth. In the past few months of work/release, he’s seen Leona just about every morning. She always gives him a quick kiss and spins away to gather her purse and briefcase. They both have jobs—a busy day ahead with people to see, just like a couple of young professionals, Cedric muses. A moment later, he’s holding her Starbucks travel cup as she threads her blue Toyota Corolla through D.C. traffic, talking fast about how he is, how she is, how they are, and what he might feel like doing this coming Saturday. The car slides up near Hooks Barber Shop.