by Ron Suskind
He meticulously made up the bed, unpacked his bags, checked the detailed schedule in his program packet to make sure the next hour was free, and then collapsed in delicious relief onto the tightly tucked green wool blanket, drifting into sleep.
Okay, everyone! Let’s move as a group over to the dining hall,” shouts one of the undergraduate chaperones, a tall black guy in a navy blue MIT shirt. “And please try not to get lost.”
Cedric feels the push of the crowd and edges forward across the sprawling lobby of MacGregor House—his nineteen-story home for the next six weeks. He listens to a conversation over his left shoulder between a Hispanic boy and a black girl who have just realized they’re wearing identical T-shirts from a high school national leadership conference for minorities. “This is great,” chirps the boy, as the girl laughs in assent. “Kind of like we’re all on our way up, all together.”
Cedric nods. He likes that—all together. He’s got company. The solitary journey, at least for now, is over.
They all jostle across the campus’s trimmed lawns, still light green in the early summer. They are acutely conscious of themselves and everything they pass, busily affecting gaits and postures and instant smiles that suit this collegial moment. Cedric modulates the speed of his step to stay tucked in the middle of the crowd as it winds a quarter-mile to MIT’s newish glass-and-steel dining hall, following a spicy aroma into a banquet room where a tower of pizza boxes is waiting, closed and still steaming.
Following a ruckus of flopping slices, overflowing two-liter bottles of soda, and bumping chairs, everyone settles in, munching away, for the first official meeting of MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science, acronyficiently called MIT MITES—as in embryonic MITers, soon to be born.
Bill Ramsey, a sixty-eight-year-old black engineer from MIT’s class of ’51 who arrived to run this program seven years ago to “give something back,” speaks first, welcoming the students and offering a gruff but lovable “call me Bill, but no other names, please” salutation. He encourages everyone to work hard, have fun, follow the rules, and, dropping an octave, “not end up in my office for the wrong reasons.” Then his leathery features break into an alligator smile: “ … not that I’d ever be less than delighted to see any of you.” He’s a charmer.
And, in his role as the program’s administrative director, he’s a skilled orchestra leader. While there’s nothing extravagant about a pizza dinner, everything tonight—like so many events over the coming weeks—has been extravagantly planned to give this precious group of budding minority achievers the proper messages.
Ramsey, a successful, retired corporate executive and black father figure, ticks off the summer semester’s schedule of study periods, midterms, and finals. Looking on are the program’s eleven student counselors, mostly college undergrads from MIT and nearby Harvard. MITES alumni themselves, five are black, four Hispanic, one of Middle Eastern descent, and one Asian.
That the ethnic mix of the counselors roughly mirrors the composition of the fifty-two wide-eyed initiates is not lost on Cedric as he gnaws the crust of his second slice of pepperoni and counts heads—about half black, half Hispanic, a few assorted others, and one boy who’s definitely white. How did he get here, Cedric wonders, and realizes that he forgot to count himself: he makes fifty-three.
Cedric watches Ramsey wrap it up. He likes the way the guy looks: his wide torso draped in a stylish blazer, his crow’s-feet and gray-flecked hair making him look sort of wise, but underneath he’s got a fist-to-the-chops toughness. He’s blunt, Cedric thinks, but he must have earned the right to be.
“And now,” concludes Ramsey, “let me throw the evening’s presentation to our faculty director, Professor Leon Trilling.”
A bald white man with thick-rimmed glasses rises slowly and nods a silent hello. He is the distinguished professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT—the lead capsule bio in the welcome packet. He stumbles forward over a slight Polish accent, residue of his childhood in Eastern Europe, as he tells them that they’ll meet with him at the end of the program to “see how you’ve done and how you’ve all enjoyed your visit.” All the kids are silent. Almost no one is eating. They’re just staring at this thin-lipped lab goat who exudes pure, arrhythmic, white power.
Almost every novitiate now has his or her visceral confirmation of the order of things—this dour man will carry forward the hard business hinted at in their welcome packets. He’s the one who will review their six weeks of classwork and size up each little MITE’s hopefulness before telling him or her whether the summer has a been a sprint to victory, toward the next starting gate as an MIT undergrad, or a fool’s errand.
Cedric looks quizzically at Trilling as the professor begins speaking, but, unlike most of his neighbors, his attention drifts. For him, whites remain largely theoretical. His meaningful interaction with them has been limited, mostly to a few teachers at Jefferson and a couple at Ballou. In any event, after so much exhausting worry about whether he’d ever make it to this esteemed place, he suddenly feels immune from doubt. He looks around at everyone staring at Trilling and notices that the pizza has been neglected. No point in letting it go to waste. What’s wrong with these kids, he wonders. Isn’t anyone still hungry?
Three days later, early on a Wednesday morning, Cedric rises, dresses, and watches the sky sift from azure to pink to orange outside his ninth-floor window. He moves purposefully about the room, organizing his desk, sorting through his fresh notebooks, and slipping the ones for Physics, Design Workshop, and Chemistry—his three morning classes—into a large red plastic folder with a zipper along the top and “MITES” stamped on the front. He carefully selects two pens and two pencils, drops them in, and examines the battered spines of a long row of textbooks lining his desk. These books, lent to him from Ballou’s storehouse of used texts, will be all he needs to succeed, he hopes. They’re all he’s ever needed.
It’s only midway through the first week of the program, and the intensity is already palpable. All the MITES were given diagnostic tests on Monday to divide the group into advanced and basic-level classes for math and science. Yesterday Cedric found out that the only advanced group he’s in is calculus.
After breakfast on Wednesday, he heads across campus to a mostly empty academic hall and quietly settles into a desk. He rotates his neck once and bounces his white Nikes on the speckled linoleum, like an athlete preparing for a trial heat. Handouts are passed out. He looks his over. What is this? Kinematics and vectors. In physics? Thought that was calculus. He looks up as class commences. After a quick good morning, Thomas Washington, a handsome, young black grad student who’s a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, starts ripping across the blackboard. Cedric, hunched forward, begins jotting madly.
After a bit, he looks around. He sees that not all the kids are scribbling. Some are just nodding. Is he missing something, he wonders. He looks back at the digit-jammed chalkboard. Better get it down now and try to figure it out later.
The same thing occurs throughout the day—each class leaves him sweaty, his hand cramped from nervous note taking. Only in calculus is he following the line of the lecture, and just barely. That night, he retreats inside his cinder block walls, working over the handouts, trying to make sense of them by double checking each one against his notes. Press, dig in, concentrate, he tells himself, and it will come. After hours of work, feeling like he has a slim foothold on some of the material, he manages to fall off to sleep.
The next morning in chemistry class, third period, he’s poised and ready. Three black girls who seem to know each other move into the desks in front of him. He hasn’t said much to anyone since arriving, but the proximity and atmospherics seem right, so he strikes it up.
“This stuff is like pretty hard, ain’t it?” he says to a tall, light-skinned girl with gold sickle-shaped earrings and expensive clothes. “I mean, I’m like afraid my hand is gonna fall off taking notes.”
“Yeah … well … some of it looks a little
different from what I’ve done in school, but I guess that’s why we’re here,” she says, shrugging, before moving on to choicer, getting-to-know-you topics. Her name is Jenica Dover, she tells Cedric, and she lives in Newton, Massachusetts, where her parents are both high school teachers. The two other girls—Isa Williams, the daughter of two Atlanta college professors, and Micah Mitchell from Baltimore, whose mom is an insurance claims adjuster and dad is a lawyer—join in, crowding close.
“You sure talk funny, southern, sort of, and you know, slangy,” says Jenica, lightly.
“For reeeal? What, like I’m slurring my words or something?” Cedric replies haltingly. “You mean, I guess, that I talk sort of ‘ghetto.’”
“I guess—if that’s the word for it,” she says, and the other girls laugh, but warmly, which surprises Cedric, and he tries to turn it all into banter: “Don’t you girls be teasing my accent.” Just then the teacher arrives, calls for quiet, and soon Cedric is, again, panting to keep pace.
On Saturday night, he saunters into his neighbor’s room and chats the guy up. His name is Mark McIntosh. He’s soft-spoken but in a firm, laid-back, cool way. Cedric already met his twin sister, Belinda, in his physics class. They live in a modest house south of Miami, the children of a toll taker and an accounting clerk. Cedric, in a half-hour of nods and “yeah, uh-huhs,” is certain they’re sort of lower middle class, like the kids he met the year that he, his mom, and his half-sisters lived in Landover. They sit around drinking Cokes from a hallway machine and crank Salt-N-Pepa on Mark’s tape player. Eventually, Cedric feels relaxed and emboldened enough to venture a dangerous, direct question.
“So, how d’jou do, on the SATs and all?” he asks.
“You know, I mean, it went pretty good,” says Mark, setting up the number under cover of bad grammar. “Like, you know, a 1380.”
Cedric tries to control his reaction but can’t, and he finds his mouth hanging open. “I don’t want to get into it,” he mutters, shaking his head, “but that’s a lot better than me.”
In the last few months of his junior year, Cedric did something he hasn’t thought much about lately—he took the SAT. His score was a 910, composed of a 380 in verbal (ranking in the thirty-fifth percentile of college-bound seniors) and a 530 in math (placing him in the sixty-fifth percentile). When he got his scores in May, he immediately decided to take it again in the fall. He decided he had been nervous and overwrought that first time. He stuck the test envelope in a drawer and refused to think about it.
But having pried Mark’s score from him, Cedric is anxious to round out a random sampling—to get some numerical comparisons to correlate with what he sees exhibited all around him in language, dress, and general worldliness.
By the middle of the following week, there’s no need for more data. Belinda, Mark’s sister, hit 1350. There are assorted others in the 1300s, lots of 1200s, and a few 1100s. One morning after chemistry, a black girl he just met bashfully demurs, “It’s embarrassing, but I sort of froze up and I only got 1090.” Cedric is so happy he spontaneously hugs her, effusing, “At least I’m not the only one.” But such an outburst is an anomaly. On balance, he’s learned to be reserved, for fear of slipping into a mispronunciation or some embarrassing parochialism. Better to listen than to risk speaking.
Two days later at dusk, a clutch of kids rushes to the eastern side of the ninth floor and squeezes into the room of Kelly Armendariz, a tall, sensitive piano prodigy and math whiz from Carlsbad, New Mexico.
It’s the end of the program’s second week, a time by which cliques have formed as kids cluster in packs of five or six, mostly along the lines of race, similar background, or shared interests. Cedric is bouncing among clusters, unable to find a single match.
But there’s still some free-form mixing, especially on a night like this, when it’s possible for even striving, insecure adolescents to look at the sky and forget about themselves for a bit.
Kelly turns off the lights and everyone stands close as Boston’s exuberant fireworks explode over the Charles River, lighting their astonished faces.
“Amazing, huh Cedric?” effuses Kelly.
“Yeah,” whispers Cedric, mostly to himself. “It’s like a dream.”
Hi, Ma.”
“Lavar! Hey baby. How is it?”
“Fine.”
“Everybody being nice and all?”
Barbara, so excited to hear Cedric’s voice, begins jumping fast across subjects that are tangible to her—the room, the food, his clothes. “You have enough to wear?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You studying hard?”
“Uh-huh. Up until two every night almost. But, you know, I think it’s coming along, getting easier,” he tells her, lying, which he hates to do. “Thing is, though, I think I’m like the only ghetto kid. I’ve sort of been checking.”
“Oh come on. I’m sure that’s not the case—it’s a minority program and all,” Barbara says.
“I guess,” he demurs, and changes the subject. They talk for a while until some kids come by on a social visit and Cedric tells her he has “to get going, ‘cause me and my friends are having a study session.”
“Well, okay. In any case, Lavar, don’t start losing faith. Nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it. Always remember that.”
And he tries to.
Midterms are fast approaching, and Cedric is slipping below the water line. Physics has become a recurring nightmare. In chemistry, he’s constantly confused. Not that the MITES program is easy for anyone. It demands work even from the top students. Shock therapy is part of the point. Using the rote skills learned at Ballou, he finds himself writing and rewriting class notes, figuring that there are clues to be found in there, somewhere.
English provides no break. In the heavily Afrocentric curriculum of the D.C. public schools, he can always apply some personal experience to a passage from Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou. Here, the first major text in his English class is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, tied to a goal of familiarizing the minority students with mainstream texts. In class, he carefully transcribes the outline from the blackboard:
Population divided into castes (social class, rank)
Alphas and Betas
More intelligent and manage society
Deltas and Gammas
Less intelligent and do menial tasks
Epsilons
Unhappy, though conditioned to be content
He looks down at it admiringly, neat and perfect. But he can’t relate it to anything; he sees only strange terms in a foreign context.
Only in calculus, his forte, has he managed to stay afloat through relentless effort. At least there he’s more confident and feels comfortable asking questions. And he gets a close look at the top students in the program, especially Andrew Parker, a student from Hawaii who seems to be part Asian, part black, and partly something else. All anyone knows for sure is that he’s brilliant. Every day in calculus, Cedric finds himself studying Andrew, the way he cocks his head or handles his pen, as though attitude and demeanor might hold clues to his success. It’s as if the instructor, Joseph Leverich, is talking only to Andrew in some secret language.
Sitting at his desk with the door closed as midnight approaches, Cedric mulls whether he can bring himself to do it: to ask Andrew for help. The kid drives half the MITES crazy. He’s so damn cocky, always holding forth. His favorite aphorism is some Asian saying about how “the hungriest lion is not the one at the top of the hill, but the lion just beneath him, who wants to get to the top.” Why is he always saying that, Cedric wonders, if it’s clear to everyone that Andrew’s at the top of the hill?
But it has been a long night of toil, and Cedric feels he’s finally closing in on a real understanding of some new ways to calculate acceleration and velocity. He just needs a nudge forward.
A few minutes later, he spots Andrew walking in the hallway and makes his request. “I really don’t want to be tutoring people, okay Cedric? That’s wh
at the counselors are for,” Andrew says, polite but unyielding. And, maybe thinking of his beloved lions, he adds, “I have to be looking up, not down, beneath me,” and he strolls into the men’s room.
Cedric, alone in the hallway holding his drooping notebook, is ready to explode. He races back to his room and slams the door, his brain burning with the words “beneath me.” “What a thing to say,” he rants, talking to the wall, “like I’m some kind of inferior human being!”
A few nights later, a crowd of students jostles into MacGregor’s lounge for Chinese food, soda, and a rare moment of release from the weekend’s study marathon for midterms. While whispers of romances have been circulating and study groups have more or less crystallized along black or Hispanic lines, this long day of wearying study has left most of the kids hard pressed to remember who’s supposed to hang with whom. Kelly Armendariz busily tries to teach the opening bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Mark McIntosh on an old piano in the lounge. Two Hispanic girls are singing a Selena song with a black guy, and, a few feet to their left, on the lounge’s industrial green carpeting, Isa Williams is teaching Micah Mitchell how to click her heels.
The counselors, having once gone through this program already, look on with tight smiles, always watchful. The academic pressure, they know, is intensifying. Midterm exams start tomorrow—along with all-nighters and panic. Some students will grow depressed; others will get sick from exhaustion. The counselors watch closely to see if anyone seems glum, confused, or bent on straying from the group.
Tonight, all the students seem happy and accounted for.
Except one.
Upstairs, Cedric is lying on his bed with the door closed and lights off, waiting for a miracle that will allow him to keep up with the others. He simply can’t work any harder. It’s only 10:30, but exhaustion from weeks of toil has overtaken him. Lying on his back, looking at the ceiling, his forward motion halted, he realizes that there’s only so much he can do. It’s not his fault that he started miles behind where most of the other kids did and he’ll have to run twice their speed to catch them.
