by Ron Suskind
The buzzer rings for dinner. Guys start easing toward the locked cell block door, slowly lining up to go to the mess. Cedric just sits, taking his time, easing out of the recollection. Thirteen years old, just a little shit. He shakes his head. That was about the time he started getting in trouble.
He looks down at the letter’s two scratchy paragraphs. Who’s he to be writing this letter, he muses, a letter from prison to an Ivy League college; sure they don’t get much jail mail in the Ivies. He reads it again, slowly, thinking that the tone of it bothers him a little. It’s sort of apologetic, like he’s apologizing to Lavar.
He frowns and folds the letter into thirds, then again lengthwise, and roughly shoves it in his pocket.
Cedric Jennings stares at his midterm paper in Calculus and finishes off a third box of Golden Grahams for lunch at Vernon Wooley Dining Hall, called the VeeDub. The grade is a 94. He looks up. Chiniqua and her roommate, Maura, are sitting across from him. He shows them the paper. They’re effusive in their praise.
But it doesn’t cheer him. He’s told Chiniqua, at least, that this is just one level above beginner math and that he shot low out of fear.
Still, when she smiles at him, he smiles back. The two girls pile plates and glasses on their trays to go, and he pours another box of Golden Grahams. It’s a cereal he ate a lot of at home, sometimes when there wasn’t much else to eat. In the last couple of days, since midterms ended, he’s been eating a lot of it.
“Cedric, how many bowls you gonna eat?” Chiniqua says.
“As many as it takes,” he says, trying to make her laugh.
“Takes for what?” she says, rising with her tray. And then she bends in close to whisper, “You should eat some real food.”
A frenzy of studying for mid-October’s midterms gave Cedric a break from the fixating strife with Rob. Everyone, Rob included, had other things to worry about. Cedric, nonetheless, did most of his studying in Rockefeller Library to avoid his roommate. Not that he had that much studying. Calculus was a walk in the park, and his only other midterm test was in Spanish.
He didn’t need to worry about bumping into Rob in room 216. His roommate is all but living on the third floor, dividing evenings among rooms of various friends.
Cedric—with sound strategic instincts from a lifetime of confrontation—forces himself not to retreat from the group of white guys so he can’t be characterized for everyone by Rob. He tries to stick with the group and shake off his confusion at their strange habits. For one, the white guys are more physical and affectionate toward one another than he’s used to seeing among the black kids from high school, who were so wrapped up with burnishing their hard exteriors. Black kids from his school and neighborhood might have hung together endlessly but rarely showed the sort of self-deprecating, carefree vulnerability that’s common here. He’s not sure how to react. No one here is boastful. They all make fun of themselves—and each other—though their underlying confidence never seems jilted. It’s the precise opposite of what has passed for normal his whole life, one spent around those whose underlying self-confidence was easily punctured.
One weekday night in Zayd and John’s room, seven or eight kids, including Ira and Florian from across the hall, start teasing each other in a way that Cedric can’t abide.
It’s homosexual banter. Black guys just don’t do it.
As the white boys start in, Cedric feels his gut tighten. “Come on, bend over and let me fill your gas tank,” one says to another, and everyone starts to crack up. “Come on. You know you want it.”
Cedric’s not laughing. He can’t. He becomes noticeably grim. They don’t understand.
So they treat him just like he wants, deep down: just like another guy. Under those rules, anyone who shows uneasiness becomes the focal point. Comfort here is practically a moral concept. Visible discomfort, on an issue like this, brings a Lord of the Flies response: haze it out of him.
“Hey, Cedric,” says Ira. “Bend over, and I’ll fill your gas tank.”
Cedric grimaces.
“Come on, Cedric,” says John, a sort of natural class president among the group. “It’s okay. I’ll bend over and you can fill up mine.” Guffaws go around. Even Zayd can’t resist the riptide.
Cedric jumps up from Zayd’s bed. “I don’t like that kind of talkin’,” he says, loud and firm but still under control. He doesn’t know what else to say. He looks down, pushes out the door, and races back to his empty room.
His door stays locked. Hours pass. At midnight, he has to go to the bathroom and ventures out, cracking the door first to see if anyone is in the hall. And then he sees it. On his grease pad is a neatly written message that anyone could walk by and read.
“Hey Cedric, Meet us later tonight in private and we all can have some real fun. Love, Ira and John.”
Cedric blows up. In a second, he’s pounding on Ira’s door, and then they’re nose to nose in the doorway. “Don’t be leaving that mess on my door so I have to wipe it off.”
“I didn’t write anything,” Ira counters. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re just doing this to annoy me, Ira! To get me going!”
A crowd is gathering in the hallway.
“Look, I do what I want to do. And I’ll do what I want to do to you,” Ira bellows. “So get out of my room.”
Everything’s in the open now, a spectator sport, a free feed.
“You can’t just accuse Ira of doing it unless you know he did,” says Corry—Cedric’s Marcia Brady—out in the hall from a neighboring room. “You don’t know it was Ira.”
“I know it’s him,” Cedric rants. “He’s done stuff like that before. Don’t tell me. He’s always saying stuff like that.”
Zayd tries to diffuse it. “Everybody’s not against you,” he says, keeping his voice quiet and even. “You think that, but it’s not true.”
Cedric halts. He looks across the corridor, now filled with mostly white peers and a few of color. All eyes are on him. They know about Rob. And now this. Everyone just stares. All he wants is to get back to his room and never come out.
John, at Zayd’s side, ends it. “Jesus, Cedric. You ignore people just to get attention, and then you get the attention and you don’t want it.”
Cedric looks, dazed, at John. His ringing ears are shutting off everything. How the hell did he end up here? While everyone stares, he walks back to his room and softly closes the door.
A few days later, Zayd is sitting on the moist grass of Brown’s main green, on an oddly warm, short-sleeve October day, talking to his buddy, Bear, about Cedric.
“Other kids wonder why I’m his friend, what I see in him,” he says, his smoothly muscled bare arms wrapped around peaks of bony knees. “And it’s strange. We’re like opposites. We’re so different in so many ways, but I just find him so interesting.”
More than any other student in the unit, Zayd has the luxury of autonomy. While John masters the fierce intimacies of a freshman dorm, Zayd seems to stand above the fray. He’s considered a touch aloof, in part because he won’t simply offer the full, instant disclosure that is common currency among college freshmen.
People, including Cedric, don’t know much about him. The few things they do know are intriguing. Zayd starred at the Laboratory School of Chicago, a progressive private school run by the University of Chicago, and took some courses at the university. He went to Northwestern University film school two summers ago, when he was just sixteen, and has written a play called Phallacy, which he calls “a sexual farce.”
One other thing is known about Zayd. He’s a slender, wide-shouldered six-foot-two, with carefully cropped, pushed-back hair, high cheekbones, and the perfect proportion of eyebrows to slender nose that is the hallmark of male models. This, combined with his mysteriousness, causes some substantial sexual frisson among the women in the unit and his various classes—energy he casually harnesses in frequent, though usually short-lived, sexual liaisons.
But the most important quality that draws people to him is invisible. Zayd is the embodiment of an ethos that, more than anything, defines merit around this campus and many elite institutions like it: constant, fearless, rigorous experimentation—both social and intellectual. The more daring, the better. By that measure, Zayd is muscle bound.
Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn emerges from a reactor core of such headlong thinking: the elegant Chicago brownstone of two fiftyish college professors on the city’s integrated and edgy south side, just a few blocks from the University of Chicago. Writers, artists, and savants of America’s progressive vanguard have, for years, passed through his living room, pollinating him and his two brothers.
His prime directive, as he mentioned in Cedric’s presence that first week of school, is “I’ll try anything.”
Which is why Zayd, among all the broad-thinking kids in this right-minded university, is the only one with the daring to knock on Cedric’s door, which has been mostly locked—locking out the world—for a week since the much discussed hallway detonation. Zayd gets no answer and writes a provocative note: “C—Came by, heard music inside. I guess we’re not friends anymore or something. Zayd.”
He passes by again as October nears an end. It’s now two weeks into what seems like Cedric’s permanent hibernation, and Zayd wonders if it may end with a transfer application and a bare mattress. The doorknob clicks open. Zayd walks in, talking casually about some new album by Tupac Shakur, the controversial and glamorous rapper, talking like nothing ever happened. Cedric, parched with solitude, can’t resist the company. To be sure, it’s a strange, wild CD Tupac just released.
“You know, Tupac’s uncle was this guy, Zayd Shakur, a radical black activist who was killed by the cops in the early ’60s,” Zayd continues. “That’s who I’m named after. My mom and dad knew him—or, I guess they knew some Black Panthers who knew him.”
“For real?” Cedric asks.
In a few days, parents will be coming for parents weekend, and the two of them talk about that for a while, sitting on Cedric’s bed. Cedric says he doesn’t know whether his mom will make it. It’s a long way, and she doesn’t have a lot of cash. Zayd nods, knowing not to ask too much, and says, “It’s going to be very weird having all those parents around.”
He pauses. “Remember my mom came by a few weeks ago—she might want to come by to say hi,” he ventures, “if that’s all right.”
“That’d be fine, no big deal,” Cedric answers easily, clearly relieved to be edging out of exile. Then they walk down to the corner to Sam Goody’s to buy a CD, figuring they could share it.
9
BILL PAYERS
on PARADE
Crunching leaves with her high-heeled boots, Bernadine Dohrn arrives at an irrefutable confirmation of middle age: the visiting of a child for parents weekend. She knows this must elicit smug smiles from those who know her or know of her, the latter being anyone with the slightest memory of the 1960s.
Let them snipe, she thinks. She’s happy to still be visible in the mind’s eye as queen mother of America’s once fearsome radical counterculture, through which she stomped in her leather miniskirt, shouting about racism and classism and exhorting her fellow travelers to bomb, pillage, and “freak out the honky establishment.”
In a fuzzy sweater, pleated skirt, and Aztec-flashy earrings, she’s wandering around the Brown campus with her husband—once her companion on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and fellow Weather Underground leader, Billy Ayers. Today they’re just another pair of sentimental, fiftyish grownups searching for the right dorm.
It’s a national hobby to track celebrated ’60s hellions—to gloat over their wrinkles and gray hair and business suits as mile markers of a generation’s lost ideals. Yet, because Bernadine and Bill are so famously anachronistic, a plain fact is obscured: they were suited to their times then and they are, likewise, suited to their times now, as middle-aged baby boomer parents.
“You remember when I talked to Zayd on the phone right after he got here?” Bill says to Bernadine. “He said, ‘Dad, it’s like my first seventeen years were just a preliminary stage, just getting me ready for this moment. I was born to be in college.’ And I said, ‘Like, hey, what about me! I’m your father. Those first seventeen years were everything to me.’”
Bill, his once illustrious shoulder-length blond curls now graying, cut short, and tucked under a baseball cap, makes a mock wounded face and Bernadine laughs heartily, as does Harriet Beinfeld, Bear’s mom. She’s an old “movement” friend who helped hide the couple and their toddler, Zayd, during the couple’s seven long years underground, furtive years when Zayd was born. Harriet is still walking beside Bernadine and Bill, except this time it’s through the wrought-iron gateway entrance to Brown’s main green.
“I think we’re all feeling that it sure would be nice to be eighteen right now,” Bernadine says wryly to her companions.
Yes, they’re all feeling it—she, Bill, and Harriet, along with many other parents wandering on this Friday afternoon at the start of a weekend’s visitation. Summing up generational zeitgeist, after all, is something Bernadine has always done. Bill, too. Striding across the Brown campus, clicking the concrete with high heels that show off her celebrated legs, Bernadine expounds about events and issues writ large—just like when she was in college—describing a conference on violence against women she just attended that showed her “how we can’t prosecute violent men with Mark Fuhrmans as our allies … how the opponents of racism and the opponents of violence against women are natural allies in the struggle.”
At this point, she and Bill are working well within the system. She’s a lawyer who runs a center for juvenile justice at Northwestern University. He’s a trailblazing professor of education at the University of Illinois who often works at solving the dilemmas of educating the urban poor. And, like so many parents—both liberal and conservative—traipsing around campus today, this pair is hooked on mass behavior and sweeping public issues in a way that their children are not.
Bill picks up Bernadine’s conversational thread, responding swiftly, breezy and hyperarticulate, about seeing the O.J. verdict in a juvenile detention center with some hardened kids who were “high-fiving and screaming that ‘I want that Johnnie Cochran as my lawyer.’” They could go on like this all day.
But, a little way across the Brown campus on the long walk to East Andrews, Bernadine’s galloping high-pitched Judy Holliday voice grows softer and less certain. She haltingly recalls what it was like taking Zayd and Bear out to dinner on an impromptu “business trip” through Providence three weeks earlier. They talked that night about Kierkegaard’s concept of dutiful love versus passionate love—something the boys had just learned in Philosophy—and she turns to tell Harriet “how the boys were making a case for dutiful love as being superior. I mean, my God, they’re so young and they’ve already lost confidence in passion. It’s part of their cautiousness about politics, about ideology, about all sorts of things that I just don’t understand. If they don’t feel a little reckless, romantic energy when they’re young, then when?”
“Lately,” she continues, after a moment, “I’m not sure about how much of what we stood for, and still stand for, will actually survive us. It’s their time now, and they’re so different from the way we were.” Her voice trails off as the others listen sentiently.
Bill and Harriet start chatting with Bear, who’s tagging along, and Bernadine’s mind wanders to Zayd, to her anticipation of spending this weekend with him. He’s her pride, her heir, and, in some ways, her nemesis. He’s discovering his talents, like she was at his age, but using them in ways she thinks are narrow and, sometimes, frivolous. Signing on to sweeping social movements? Fighting for larger causes? Forget it. It’s all so fragmented with these kids these days, she mulls. Everything focused on personal behavior and group identity, inward fixations; everyone a one-man show, displaying themselves through consumerism and fashion. Yes, they believe in things, but nothing
they’ll sacrifice for. There are no overarching principles that Zayd or any of his peers seems to embrace. Take women’s rights. Here she is, fighting against the dehumanization of women, and Zayd, using all of his sexual sway, treats them like targets. Drives her crazy! She told a friend recently, “What Zayd needs is a beautiful, brilliant girl to kick his ass.” A girl sort of like she was, at twenty.
She sighs. She’s not going to get into arguments with Zayd, not this weekend. His counterattacks—about the price she and Bill paid for losing themselves in ideology, about how you should take care of yourself and your own fulfillment before you start saving the goddamn world, how the two of them never want to grow up—leave her spent. No, she’s going to be good. Of course, it could be worse, Bernadine thinks. Her friends with girls who are Zayd’s age moan that every last precious daughter has already had a dorm room lesbian encounter.
Bernadine walks quietly for a moment, then perks up again, remembering one moment from her recent visit that has heartened her: getting to meet Zayd’s new friend, a boy named Cedric Jennings. She tells Bill that after her dinner with Zayd and Bear that night, “Zayd wanted me to meet Cedric. But he told me that Cedric is ‘really hard to deal with, really out there,’ and I told him I can act appropriately. So we went to Cedric’s room. And I said Hi to him … that I’d heard a lot about him and that I wanted to meet his mother during parents weekend. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know, she doesn’t say much.’ And I told him, ‘No problem. I can handle that.’ And then we left. I mean, I think it’s terrific that he and Zayd have become friends. At least that’s one good thing. Zayd may not be committed to much, but at least he’s been taught to venture out, to experiment a bit.” Everyone nods at this and she smiles, looking up at the brick horseshoe of Andrews dorm just ahead.
Yes, her Zayd is an experimenter who clearly shares his mom and dad’s penchant for knowing which way the wind blows, being as fitted to his generation’s awakening as they were to theirs. Bernadine and Bill, of course, enlisted in their era’s “try everything” mania and pushed it to the limit. Appropriately, Zayd’s oft-spoken “try anything” credo takes him in a different direction. Bernadine knows its full text is more like, “I’ll try anything … that my searching, mush-brained, never-grow-up parents haven’t already tried.”
