by Ron Suskind
He slumps down in a chair in front of her desk, his back to the fan.
“Guess everybody knows it’s not going too good,” he says with a doleful laugh and passes it across to her.
Her eyes wander down the page, reading his scrawl: “I’ve had to achieve at Ballou without much help …. What did I learn? Watch out for the Dreambusters. You know who they are. Dreambusters are everywhere. Students, teachers, and administrators who said ‘You can’t, you won’t.’ … Dreambusters follow you all over this part of town … you got to fight them … you’ve got to get them before they get you,” and on and on.
She looks up. “Maybe you want to start with something positive, something hopeful. What are some other lessons you’ve learned?”
“Well, be cautious about picking your friends ’cause not everybody wants you to succeed.”
“Okay, I suppose,” she says. “An important message, I think I’m hearing, is not only to watch out for the Dreambusters, but also, and maybe more important, is that you have to keep those dreams in sight and hold on tight to them.”
Cedric considers this for a moment. She opens an English textbook on her desk, spins it, and slides it to him, “Remember this poem from class?”
It’s a Langston Hughes poem called “Dreams,” and Cedric reads the first line: “Hold fast to Dreams, for if dreams die life is a broken winged bird … ”
His face softens.
“Yeah, this might work. Uh-huh.”
He thinks for a minute. “I guess,” he says, trying to summon conviction, “that every person has a dream to walk across that stage at graduation.” Even as he says it, he feels guilty. Of course, the other kids have dreams, but over the last four years it was easier not to think about that—it made his big dreams seem bigger and his journey seem more heroic, like he was truly different from the rest of them in some fundamental way.
Ms. Briscoe smiles at him. “‘A dream to walk across that stage’ … that sounds pretty good,” she says, nodding, not wanting to make him suspicious by being too enthusiastic. “I think you’d feel good saying something like that.”
Soon he’s off to a quiet place to start scribbling. Two hours later, in a conference room next to Dr. Jones’s office, Ms. Thompson reads it and gives her assent. “A little rough,” she says, anxious to get home, “but it might work. Okay. It’s fine to say what you feel, Cedric, up to a point. But you have to think about what other kids feel, too.”
Clarence Taylor is neatly lining up just-washed beakers, storing everything for the summer, when Cedric wanders in, befuddled, as though he’s looking for something he’d left here.
“Oh, hi Mr. Taylor,” he says softly.
“Well, hi there,” says Clarence, trying not to sound too surprised or delighted, but hinting at both. Over the past six months, they have grown apart. Cedric thought Clarence was pushing him too hard, not allowing him to breathe and enjoy the victory of Brown’s acceptance. And Clarence, a complete workaholic himself, didn’t know how to turn the pressure down a notch.
Now, after no contact since winter, they are alone. Cedric’s explanation for stopping by is that he’d just gotten approval on his graduation speech and he “has some time to kill.” He eases into a favorite desk near the window and Clarence begins puttering around, as always, in perpetual motion. There’s so much ground to cover and so little time that Clarence chooses carefully, asking first about his mom, about graduation coming up, and about classes Cedric plans to take next year at Brown.
They joke about some of the younger honor students coming up, mostly girls and one promising sophomore boy. “They keep coming,” says Cedric.
“But none quite like you,” Clarence lets slip but then catches himself, not wanting to get sentimental. It’s his role, he tries to remind himself, to be left behind. It’s enough, he remembers telling Cedric last year, that you “get to see them grow, right there in front of you.” But he’s not letting go—not quite yet.
“Hey! Wait,” Clarence chirps. “Did I tell you about the Boston Marathon in April? About what happened?”
Cedric starts to laugh in anticipation. “NO! Oh my Gaawwwd. What?”
It’s a doozy, an allegorical gem, and Clarence lays it out sweet and long and full of relish, about how he was coming up past the statue of Johnny Kelley, the ancient Boston marathoner who won the race in the 1930s and ran it into the 1990s (“a hard, ‘never say die’ old coot, that Kelly”) and “I look over and this woman is running alongside me.” They’d exchanged nods a few miles back and so then started to talk again, puffing away. She was white and a judge in Boston, and she was tiring. “Oh yes, Cedric, she was flagging, that judge, and she tells me that she’s got a friend that lives right near here in one of the nice houses” near the marathon route. And how “she was thinking of running right over to that friend’s house right now, getting something cool to drink and calling it quits …. And I told her, ‘Yes, Ma’am, I’m feeling that way too, sometimes you feel too tired to go on … but you got to reach deeper for inspiration.’”
He pauses, savoring it, using every precious second. “And then, Cedric … I began to sing to her, right there as we ran.”
Cedric’s jaw drops in mock surprise and he claps once, egging Clarence on, as the teacher throws back his head and lets it flow:
When Peace Like a River, attendeth my way,
When sorrow, like sea billows, roll.
Whatever My Lot, thou hath taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul. It is well,
it is well, with my soul.
As the teacher begins to repeat the verse—Hymn 189, it so happens, from the Standard Baptist Hymnal—Cedric wordlessly gets up and moves to the blackboard, all reflex, it seems, and begins scribbling sine and cosine, X’s and parentheses. Clarence squints at the distant chalkboard. The scribbles are the start of a calculus proof.
“The integrating of two whole numbers, I see,” Clarence says with the same reverent tone as his just finished hymn. “You still got it! Look at that boy go!”
Chalk is flying, white chips falling on Cedric’s head and shoulders, his hand moving in furious arcs, the dark green board filling with arithmetic Sanskrit as it turns olive in the early evening sun.
“I wish all integration was this easy,” quips Cedric, nearing the proof’s finale. “We’d all be better off.”
And Clarence Taylor laughs, loud and long, feeling, for an instant, like he and Cedric Jennings are just starting out.
Beautiful—they drag us halfway across the city and Roosevelt High’s auditorium turns out to be hardly any bigger than Ballou’s,” fumes Barbara Jennings as she glares at Neddy. Her daughter shrugs and seems happy to slip away to chase her seven-year-old, Lawrence, who just disappeared down a hallway.
Barbara is working up a powerful sweat, but perspiration is no great feat with an afternoon high temperature of 96.
“Bishop Long’s wife hates being hot,” she groans, wishing Neddy would get back here so there’d be someone to complain to—so she wouldn’t have to be talking out loud to herself like some damn fool. “I just don’t know what Mother Long will do.”
Barbara has always been most comfortable and settled when she felt like she was rescuing her Lavar—from infidel drug dealers or his intemperate father, from carping teachers or false idols of peer pressure. Not to mention poverty, despair, and hopelessness.
But on this day of victory—graduation day—there are no demons left to fight, at least not for her. It will only be him, up there.
Soon the Jennings entourage is here and seated, midway in a side section, all in a row: Barbara; then Bishop’s Long’s wife, Mother Long, and her sister, Skinny, who’s anything but; then Cedric’s paternal grandmother, Maggie; his half-sisters, Leslie and Neddy; and, on the end, little Lawrence.
The sweltering auditorium at Roosevelt High School—a turn-of-the-century monstrosity with Yankee church spires and crumbling cornices—is filling quickly, and the balcony is n
ow opened. Maggie mentions something about Cedric Gilliam wanting to come but having a lot of work. He was paroled in November and just started working at a new barbershop. Under Barbara’s wilting glare, she adds that “he wasn’t sure, I don’t think, if Lavar really wanted him here.”
Barbara takes a deep breath. The man’s whole life is an excuse, she starts, but quickly decides it’s better—simpler—that he’s not here. She turns to make small talk with Mother Long and periodically cranes her neck to watch the crowds of parents as they jam in, women mostly, it seems, rows of them, some casually dressed in jeans, others, like Barbara, more formal. Many are coming straight from work, like she did, but in their uniforms—a nurse, a toll taker, a cop.
Ballou’s music teacher silently cues the high school’s small band, clustered up against the stage. A solemn “Pomp and Circumstance” marks the arrival of the graduates, with LaCountiss, Cedric, and a few others who will sit on the stage leading the procession down one of the main aisles.
Barbara spots him. “There … see him?” she says to Mother Long in a high, almost girlish voice. “Gaawd. Doesn’t he look good?”
He does—and everyone can see: the boy near the front of the line, the long gown accentuating his height, girls on all sides. It quickly becomes clear that there will be an absence of the decorum typical of graduation ceremonies. Before the first stanza of “Pomp and Circumstance” is over, people are screaming.
“WE LOVE YOU TANISHA!” is wailed from the balcony. A bunch of kids in their royal-blue silky gowns, with the gold “Ballou Class of ’95” sash, look upward and one—Tanisha, no doubt—waves to her family.
Other names hurl from the crowd, whoops and yells for Jameses and LaShawns and Keiths, a thunderous “WE ALL WITH YOU NATASHA,” seconded by cries for Jamaals, Latoyas, and Pernells, providing lyrics for the stately processional tune.
It doesn’t take long for the graduates to settle into their seats, and Barbara looks down at the program. About two hundred names are listed across three pages, each page carrying a small-print disclaimer: “The listing of names on the program does not imply that students have met all requirements for graduation.”
The national anthem and a posting of colors is followed by a few introductions. The place sounds like a rush hour train station, with a low, steady hum of conversation, one thousand or so people all now fanning themselves with the heavy bond paper of the program. Principal Jones, suave as always, sporting a dark, tailored suit, today with a sharp, yellow tie, starts with an admonition, chiding the assembled that “our young people have prepared speeches and if you are quiet, they can continue ….”
It is the first of many tongue lashings hurled by the stylishly appointed blacks on the cool, elevated stage—an assortment of school board members, District of Columbia school administrators, $80,000-a-year principals and vice principals. It’s not a crowd that takes to ultimatums well. Most of the sweating parents never graduated from high school, much less attended college, and are certainly not going to be reined in at the only graduation many will ever attend by some distant, bourgeois blacks.
Up at the podium, Keisha Ward, class vice president, shouts a short welcome statement through the microphone, asking her fellow students to “look around and see those survivors of these trying years and also see our missing friends, who could not hold on.”
Barbara, squeezing some outrage from her reserve tanks, leans toward Mother Long—“No respect at all, these people,” she says, “just like at the school,” and Bishop’s wife shakes her head in stagy disgust. Barbara studies the accomplished suburban blacks up on stage, admiringly. She wants to yell out that it’s her son up there, so all those “honored guests” will know that she’s different—that Barbara Jennings doesn’t belong in this unruly mob.
Cedric belongs up there—that she knows. And Barbara realizes that he’s sitting among these accomplished people because she always thought that’s where she belonged—no matter what other people said.
“Can you quiet down, just a little bit!” exhorts a svelte, smartly dressed female school board member from the lectern. “This is an important day in these students’ lives and it needs to be orderly and quiet …. Maybe if you’re quiet, you won’t be as hot.”
An obese woman from behind Barbara offers the crowd’s reply: “Oh Puleeeeze. A slender lady from up there—and SHE TALKING ABOUT HOT?!” This gets some laughs from the nearby rows and Barbara has to chuckle, despite herself.
Mother Long glares at Barbara from the neighboring seat, a “nothing funny about it” look on her face, and says, “When Cedric gets up there, he better say God has helped you through this, that God’s the one who should be thanked today.”
“Oh, he will, don’t worry,” says Barbara sheepishly, before she’s drowned out by the Ballou chorus as it launches into a soulful rendition of the old spiritual “Amazing Grace,” changes course midway into the Afrocentrically sensible theme from Disney’s Lion King, and finishes raucously on “got no worries, for the rest of your days, it’s my trouble free philosophy, Hacuna Matata.”
Dr. Constance Brooks, Ballou’s vice principal, in a white Liz Claiborne number with a black collar, follows the song with more verbal attacks. “We will have to move people out of the aisles. There are seats in the back of the balcony. Please clear the aisles, or the fire department will move us out of the auditorium.” This prompts no discernible movement. Finally, with no point in waiting longer, she murmurs, forlornly, “Ladies and gentlemen, our salutatorian, Cedric Jennings.”
Down below, Barbara Jennings’s anxiety finally dissolves. She looks up at the stage, transfixed, unspeakably happy to simply be the mother of that boy.
A hundred feet away, Cedric places his glasses on the podium, flips his tassel to the far side of his mortar board, and rustles three pages of typed notes, trying to keep his elbows from locking.
As he looks up and clears his throat, he is certain that the din has actually risen a notch, his ears picking up a few moans along with a mocking “Ceeeeddric” or two. Kids love saying the name. It will always mean “nerd” to them.
He thanks the honored guests for their presence (including Mayor Marion Barry, whose seat remains empty) and turns to thank Dr. Jones, who shifts a bit in his chair and winks in a gesture of kinship, signaling his hope that Cedric will stick to the kinder, gentler text that was approved yesterday.
Cedric turns back to the crowd and begins reading. “I would first like to start by thanking God for giving me the strength and courage to be where I am today. I would also to thank the many people who have had a positive impact on my life, especially my loving mother and my family.”
The din is indeed, rising, the crowd having already passed its allotment of attentiveness. People who aren’t using their programs as fans are noisily flipping pages to see how many more of these speeches are coming.
Cedric pushes forward gamely, keeping his voice loud and even: “When I was asked to deliver the salutatory address I was afraid because it seemed an awesome responsibility … many of us who are going on to college, to work, or to the military, understand the feelings of fear and responsibility in our new endeavors … but if we, the class of 1995, are to face a new day, we must become self-sufficient, responsible, and determined in rising to the challenges of the twenty-first century.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” says a man leaning close to his teenage daughter a few rows from the stage, and the girl laughs. Cedric hears the whole thing.
He tries to remain composed, again rustling pages on the lectern. “In our high school years, we have learned great lessons that will serve us well in the future. Most importantly, we have learned to hold tight to our dreams, although there have been many obstacles on our way to a high school diploma ….”
He pauses and, for the first time, really looks up from the text. The crowd is blurry. He looks quickly to the right edge of the podium and sees his glasses. He forgot to put them on, and he can’t stop to do it now in midspeech.
He looks outward again, feeling his throat tighten. The next part he knows by heart. It’s the first thing he wrote two weeks ago. It’s the very reason he’s up here, or so he decided this morning when he added back the next three paragraphs.
“You see,” he begins, his voice halting but seeming to sound conversational, “we have learned how to fight off Dreambusters. Yes, Dreambusters. Their favorite lines are ‘you cannot’ or ‘you will not.’ Many of us have been called crazy or even laughed at for having big dreams.”
Some in the crowd look up, perplexed, as though they aren’t sure what he just said.
“I will never forget being laughed at for saying I wanted to go to the Ivy League. I’ve been told that I wouldn’t make it and, quote unquote,” he says, “that I ‘couldn’t hang.’”
He can hear students mumbling to each other in the middle seats just in front of him, and he imagines what they must be saying: Can it be that the nerd is giving some back? Giving it back to the whole class! Who does he think he is?
He grabs the edges of the podium, intently studies the blur of royal blue while he waits for the room to quiet. He knows some of them are frowning, giving him the dead-eye. But he can’t make out their faces, and that makes it all possible, allowing him to see only the indignities, stretching back years—the chiding, the slights, the threats. And finally, he’s purging it, spitting it all back. It’s a spectacle. People are stunned, silent.
“When one of my peers found out that I was going to Brown, he told me I wouldn’t last two years. While they were laughing in the corner and trying to predict my future, I laughed back … ” He pauses, and it becomes clear that he’s ad libbing, searching. “I said to myself, ‘THERE IS NOTHING ME AND MY GOD CAN’T HANDLE.”
The crowd erupts. It’s thunderous. A few people are standing. Even the badass kids have to laugh—the human punching bag is finally punching back.
