A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  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.

  The code blue excitement subsides, and Mr. Momen, an Iranian immigrant with a thick accent, closes the classroom door. “All right, every one of you, listen,” he says. “We have today, for you, some exercises that have to be done by the end of class. No exceptions.” He passes out the core teaching tool at Ballou: the worksheet. Attendance is too irregular and books too scarce, even in the advanced sections, to actually teach many lessons during class. Often, worksheets are just the previous day’s homework, and Cedric can finish them quickly.

  Today, though, he runs into trouble. A few minutes in, he looks up and realizes that a girl in the next row is copying his work.

  “Hey, what’re you doing?” he snaps. She begins to giggle and then parlays his attention into a sexual jibe.

  “Listen, Cedric, if you looking for something hot and wet, I’ll give it to you.”

  Guffaws all around.

  “Yeah, and I’ll give you something hard and dry right back,” he counters as the class erupts in catcalls. Cedric is removed from the room. “I put in a lot of hours, a lot of time, to get everything just right,” he says to Mr. Momen from a forest of beakers and microscopes in the adjoining lab area. “I shouldn’t just give answers away.”

  “Cedric,” Mr. Momen says as he turns back to the others, “you have to figure out a way to get along better with people. Other students try hard, too. They’re not all trying to get you.”

  Cedric sits for a moment, alone again, and quietly pushes through the worksheet, calculating, at the very least, what’s being asked of him in physics. He leads the class—including his rival, LaCountiss—in grade points for the semester.

  After class, he makes his way across the width of the building toward the cafeteria, thinking about what Mr. Momen said and what it’s supposed to mean. How can he possibly get along with kids who hate him, he asks himself as he walks, lifting his gaze from the floor and searching the faces of kids flowing in the opposite direction in the hallway. Hate? Well, maybe not hate exactly, he decides. It’s more that they hate what he represents, or something.

  As he watches them pass, Cedric struggles with something that he would rather not know and that he manages, day in and day out, to keep safely submerged: that these kids are not all that different from him, that what mostly differentiates him are transferable qualities like will and faith. Just like him, they are almost all low-income black kids from a shadowy corner of America. His exile is, in large measure, self-induced and enforced. If he changed, soon enough he’d be accepted.

  He knows all this but pushes the thoughts out of his head. Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin. His face, uncharacteristically open and searching a moment ago, slips into its customary pursed-lipped armor. Don’t give up, don’t give in. Other kids, passing him in the hall, pick it up. No one’s a fool here. They recognize Cedric’s face—pinched, dismissive, looking right past them. They’ve seen this look before, on the faces of white people, and they respond accordingly.

  “Can you believe that sorry ass Cedric,” whispers a pudgy boy, leaning against a locker as Cedric passes.

  A boy on his left—a tall drink of water in a Nike shirt—nods. “Right, just look at him, would you? Kind of pants are those?”

  “He needs a good beating,” murmurs a third, just loud enough for Cedric to hear.

  Cedric cuts forward like a torpedo. Around the next bend comes Phillip Atkins, a tough, popular fellow junior sporting a C- average who is, lately, in Cedric’s face.

  “Oh, look, it’s the amazing nerdboy,” Phillip chides as he approaches. Cedric tries to slip by, but there’s a crowd up ahead watching a craps game in the hall, causing a backup. There’s nowhere to go.

  “Come on nerdboy, you and me, let’s do it, right now,” says Phillip, feigning a punch as a girl holds him back and two boys, standing nearby, giggle. Phillip is known for his sense of humor.

  “Why don’t you leave me be, Phillip?” says Cedric after a moment. “What’d I ever do to you?”

  Phillip, satisfied at getting a rise, just smiles. The two stand for a minute, eye to eye: Cedric in a white shirt, khakis, and black felt shoes, math book in one hand, the other hand clenched in a fist, shaking nervously; Phillip, a bit shorter and wiry, dressed in a brown T-shirt with jeans pulled low. The latter offers
a menacing deadeye stare, copied immaculately from the gang leaders he admires, and Cedric breaks it off, looking away, flustered.

  The craps game is over, and his exit has cleared. Throwing a sidelong scowl at Phillip, Cedric slips forward through the dispersing mob, in the midst of which Delante Coleman collects his dice and rises from a crouch. Delante, known to all as “Head” because he helps run one of the school’s largest gangs, the Trenton Park Crew, is short and stocky, with caramel-light skin, hazel eyes, and the temerity of a killer. He helps manage a significant drug dealing and protection ring, directs a dozen or so underlings, drives a Lexus, and, in his way, is every bit as driven as Cedric. It’s what each does with his fury and talents that separates these two into a sort of urban black yin and yang.

  Cedric passes tight against the lockers, and Head, flirting with some girls, doesn’t see him—which is just as well. Head and some of his crew enjoy toying with honor students, or “goodies,” as he calls them, messing with their hair, taking their books (if they’re foolish enough to carry any), scuffing them up a bit.

  By now, Cedric has cut hard to the left into a different hallway, one that leads toward the cafeteria, which is a few feet ahead. He often tries to eat in empty classrooms—the cafeteria being the type of free-fire zone that someone of his lowly social status is wise to avoid—but today a friend of his, a girl, convinced him to meet her at the cafeteria. Just inside the side entrance, she is waiting for him.

  “’Bout time you got here, Cedric. I’m starving,” says LaTisha Williams, arms folded but smiling radiantly. “It’s wrong to keep your boo waiting.”

  Cedric says nothing, just smirks at her and rolls his eyes. LaTisha is not his “boo,” slang for girl- or boyfriend. She’s bubbly and has a pretty face, but she’s huge—five-foot-two and maybe 250 pounds. She’s an outcast, just like he is. But, he concedes, handing her a pinkish tray, she usually manages to cheer him up.

  Mostly, she talks and he laughs, offering modest rejoinders, and now off she goes again. Today she’s doing a riff—mostly for the benefit of another girl with them in line—about Cedric’s long-ago flirtation with Connie Mitchell, a gorgeous, light-skinned ingenue from the Bolling Air Force base area, who arrived here midway through tenth grade.

  “You see, Cedric goes up to her and says, ‘Hi. Hi, you new here? Can I do anything for you. Can I, can I?’” says LaTisha. “He was on her like a dog, sniffing her up and down.” Cedric chuckles at this, appreciating any story showing that, sexually speaking, his clock ticks in the traditional fashion. He’s made passes at other girls, though it never amounts to much, and he’s begun to see himself through other people’s eyes, wondering if he’s just not manly enough to have any success with women. Though his voice has yet to change, he has no feminine affectations. He’s pleasant looking and tallish, his dress unflamboyant but neat and usually color coordinated. He suspects that it is this terrain that’s atypical and upside down—but he’s not sure. All he knows is that, here, no one wants to be with an honor student—a pariah—except maybe LaTisha, who has few alternatives. Cedric Jennings simply has no social currency at Ballou.

  “Cedric, you just ain’t a woman’s man,” LaTisha says a few minutes later, once they’re seated, certain she’ll get a rise out of him. But Cedric, increasingly glum about the subject and anxious to leave the cafeteria, bears down on his grilled cheese and doesn’t get into it. LaTisha quietly eats her undressed salad and leaves to get a second one.

  Looking across the raucous cafeteria crowd, Cedric is reminded of the assembly—probably most of these kids were there—and what he said that day to Mr. Taylor, about how not going made him feel ashamed.

  Ashamed. The word has been smoldering inside him for weeks. What he said, it didn’t track somehow. Was he ashamed of getting all A’s? No, he was proud of that. So why wouldn’t he show his face? Is it maybe that he’s ashamed of being alone all the time, of being so lame? No girlfriend. No close guy friends. He tears at an empty carton of milk with his long, agile fingers. No, that doesn’t seem right either. That’s all part of his solitary mission to get out of here and off to a famous college.

  LaTisha comes back. “You okay, Cedric? You look kind of bad.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m all right. Just been thinking about why I feel the way I do.”

  With the afternoon temperature reaching seventy, students start slipping out early from one of Ballou’s ten exits. Cedric sits through his afternoon classes and finds himself absently watching the clock. After the dismissal bell, he runs into LaTisha in the hallway and tells her he’s not going to stay his usual two hours or so after school. He thinks he’ll just “go home, watch TV, and crash.”

  She says she’s going home, too, and they walk outside to the bus stop just in front of the school. In the very late afternoons, when Cedric often leaves the building, this stop is empty. At 3:30, though, it’s jammed and rowdy with kids who’ve been cooped up for the winter in nearby public housing projects, small apartments, or modest homes, all now feeling the free sunshine on their faces.

  He and LaTisha take different buses home, so she’s talking fast to fill the few moments they’ll have before parting. He’s nodding and half listening. Then something happens.

  A boy a few feet away from them grabs another boy around the neck, pulls out a pistol, and holds it to the other kid’s head. People are screaming and trying to get away, bumping into each other, not sure which direction to run. Cedric, backing onto the grass, turns to see the gun again and feels himself flinching. He sees that LaTisha has fallen down, her great girth slumped onto the concrete.

  And then it’s over. The kid with the gun runs across the street and disappears. No shots were fired, and some kids murmur about whether the gun, which was an odd greenish color, was real.

  Cedric’s bus comes and, after helping LaTisha up, he gets on, shaken, and finds a seat. He pushes himself tight into the seat’s corner, leaning his shoulder against the bumpy tin siding as the bus rolls up to the avenue stop. The dealers are out in force today, and, looking at them, he realizes that he’s been fooling himself, that there is no safe distance, no safe place to go, not in school, not on the street, not anywhere.

  His breath feels short. He closes his eyes, presses his fingers against them, and feels that his hands are trembling. In the dark field behind his closed lids, he sees clearly the gun, the terrified face of the kid with the barrel pressed against his temple, and LaTisha falling. He jerks his eyes open, tries to push the images away, and finds himself recalling something that happened in school a year ago. It was just a day or two after last spring’s awards ceremony. A kid came up to him in the hall, a smallish kid in a green army jacket. The kid said something about not liking Cedric’s face and how he saw him get his $100 award check and it made him sick—and there was a bulge in the army jacket’s pocket. The heavy green fabric was tented into a triangle pointing out from the kid’s hip. Cedric looked down and could see the back of a rat-gray steel handle.

  Cedric can’t remember much else—just that he couldn’t speak, that he ran through a cluster of kids into the bathroom, terrified, and decided not to tell Mr. Washington or anyone about it, afraid that there’d be retaliation if he squealed. He never saw the kid again.

  He hasn’t thought about any of that for almost a year. He just pushed it out of his mind. But now, as the bus rumbles through the gritty circus on Martin Luther King Avenue, it suddenly dawns on him. Maybe that’s why he didn’t go to the awards assembly. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of his achievements or too weak to face the razzing. He was scared. Maybe that kid’s still out there. That’s why he hid. He’s scared right now. Nothing wrong with that.

  He lets out a little high-pitched laugh, drawing an anxious stare from an old woman sitting next to him. He smiles at her and she looks away. Yes sir, he muses, feeling a weight lift. His absence didn’t mean they’d won and he’d lost. He was simply scared to death. That’s something he can live with.

  2


  DON’T LET THEM HURT

  YOUR CHILDREN

  Barbara Jennings sits in her cubicle on the third floor of a sprawling Department of Agriculture building in downtown D.C. She looks at the check lying like a mackerel in the middle of her calendar mat: $445.22, made out to her landlord.

  Rent. There’s a knot in her gut, like a squeezing fist. She feels it on the first day of almost every month—and today is March 1. In a few minutes she’ll begin her involved ritual, taking two buses to the offices of the real estate firm that operates scores of buildings in Southeast so she can personally deliver this payment.

  She hates having to do it, but she has no grounds to quarrel. Yes, payments, in the past, have been late. Yes, her credit report is like a train wreck on computer paper. Not that it’s uncommon for folks in her neighborhood. What galls her is how her landlord profits enthusiastically from understanding the vulnerability of his customers. If you’re one day late, it’s an additional charge of $32.50. If it goes two weeks, eviction proceedings commence and legal fees swiftly pile up.

  She leaves the office building, popping open her umbrella against a light rain, and decides to take a roundabout path to the subway to stop by the bank machine. She slips in her card as an act of faith. Maybe she calculated wrong, or there’s been some sort of credit, or one of her prayers has been answered.

  Not today. Available balance: $478. She withdraws $30 and slips the folded $20 and $10 bills into her skirt pocket.

  “Lord,” she mumbles, “the bad week is here again.”

  The ride is long, arching around half the city to the landlord’s office. From there, she catches another bus for the winding journey to church. Tonight is the Tuesday night prayer meeting. Last year, Cedric said he didn’t want to go on Tuesdays, that he had too much homework, and she assented. He goes on Thursdays and Sundays, and she decided, reluctantly, that that is enough.