A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

Neddy wipes her lips with a coral cloth napkin and smiles sympathetically at her mother. “Let’s be real. I was a B to C student. I wasn’t like Lavar.”

  But Barbara presses on, spinning a story from her own youth. “I used to pass my math homework around the room to the other kids, so they could get the answers all right, too. And the teachers never caught me.”

  From across the marinara pansy, Cedric beams. “You were good, too, weren’t you?” he says, his eyes locking onto hers, his face rosy with pride.

  They are the only people in the room. “Yes, Lavar,” she says. “I was good, too. I was very good.”

  By Sunday morning, Barbara and Neddy are already thinking about Washington. They both have to work tomorrow, and it’s seven long hours to D.C., so they angle to leave before lunch. After their one night at the Holiday Inn—Barbara’s funds now all but depleted—they pack up the suitcases and catch a cab to Cedric’s dorm for a brief farewell.

  Other than last night’s dinner, there has been no interaction with the weekend’s army of mostly white baby boomers, so many of whom are coming full circle to beloved campus life. The spirit, for those parents, was summed up by one mother Barbara overheard in the Adesso waiting area last night: “It’s a funny feeling being back at college,” she said to her daughter, “but I guess you never can go home again. Isn’t that Thomas Wolfe, dear? Or someone?”

  Such sweet sentimentalities, felt by most parents now packing up their cars, are as foreign to Barbara as the 1960s counterculture—a mostly white phenomenon, after all. “Negroes” and their plight were, of course, part of the progressive discussions that swept campuses and helped set political and moral codes for this huge generation. Yet blacks made up only 6.4 percent of the U.S. college population in 1968.

  Barbara, poor as a teenager during the 1960s and as an adult in the 1990s, has spent her life on a parallel plane. Threading her way through packed cars in the dorm parking lot, she reflects that she doesn’t connect with any of it.

  Ascending the eastern stairwell of the Andrews dorm, Neddy tagging close behind, she looks up to see an attractive white family descending.

  “Are you Barbara Jennings?” says a high, clear woman’s voice.

  Barbara blinks and stops on her step.

  “Hi, I’m Bernadine Dohrn.”

  Barbara looks at her dispassionately. “Oh, hi,” she says, befuddled.

  “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m Zayd’s father,” says Bill, sensing that Barbara may not know who they are.

  “We admire your son enormously,” Bernadine adds. “He’s a great kid.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” Barbara says, perplexed by such cloying, white-hot affection from people she’s never met.

  “This is Zayd,” says Bill, pulling his son forward by the arm. Zayd bows his head toward Cedric’s mom and smiles wanly.

  Barbara, though, seems genuinely pleased. She knows Cedric likes him. “Oh, yes, Zayd! It is nice to meet you,” she says warmly before she and Neddy move purposefully by the contingent and continue up the steps.

  “Well, maybe next time we’ll get to see you, spend some time together,” says a clearly dispirited Bernadine to Barbara’s passing left shoulder. She gets a sidelong nod as response.

  Up one flight, Barbara turns to Neddy, feeling a residue of fatigue from the weekend’s low buzz of tension from not belonging here, from worrying that she may embarrass her son. “You know, I think I’m ready to go home,” Barbara says softly. “It’ll actually be nice to get back.”

  10

  A BURSTING HEART

  Five blocks downwind of campus, just before the road curves to the gritty row houses of East Providence, is a pillared neo-Georgian mansion. The oldish building, cut into honeycombed medical offices, has a winding staircase, milky glass partitions, and strange medicinal odors. It is filled on most days with senior citizens on Medicaid.

  But, once an hour or so, a frazzled student can usually be seen sitting in a corner chair of the waiting area, counting seconds and looking out a tall window onto the parking lot. He is here to receive $40-an-hour academic life support: upstairs, quick right, second door on the left.

  The office is small, eight feet by ten feet, and Helaine Schupack, the tutor, likes it that way. She and the student are never far apart, hovering, shoulder to shoulder, over her narrow desk, mercilessly dissecting a term paper or gleaning the five trenchant points from a thirty-page chapter of gobbledygook. The walls are bland and mostly blank. No distractions. Nowhere to run.

  Helaine is a very good tutor—the lucky students end up here. She is known around Brown by administrators and professors (her husband, Mark, is an emeritus professor of economics), and referrals come, randomly but steadily, from around the university’s circumference. Maybe a student is dragged to an academic dean’s office by an especially attentive dorm counselor. Or some eagle-eyed professor realizes that the drooping wallflower in the last row is going to fail the midterm. Or, possibly, a savvy parent detects the scent of suppressed panic in a late-night phone call. Those and countless other instances often lead to a skulking, furtive trek for kids ranging from foreign students with language problems to, as Helaine often says coyly, “some kids of the famous.”

  No names, please. She knows they don’t like to come here, any of them. So they don’t tell anyone.

  Tardiness and missed appointments are common. She looks at her watch: it’s 4:19 P.M. on the first Friday in November. “Is his name pronounced Cedric or Ceeedric,” she mutters to herself. Whichever way, he’ll soon be twenty minutes late.

  Helaine—a wiry bantamweight of an indeterminate age above fifty, just over five feet with a gray moptop, the gaze of a hawk, and quick, precise hands—pulls a thin file marked “C. Jennings” from a drawer. She reads a letter in it from Donald Korb. He’s been trying to get this student to see her since early September. Helaine remembers Korb well. When she was helping run a learning disabilities center through Massachusetts General Hospital a few years back, she tutored Donald’s son, David. He was in high school at the time and hitting some academic shoals. Donald was delighted with the results: David went on to the University of California at Berkeley and is now working for Citibank in New York.

  Donald was acutely concerned about Cedric being overmatched at Brown. At least that’s what he told Helaine when he called in mid-September in his effort to set up today’s meeting.

  There’s thumping on the stairs. A tallish black student, breathless and murmuring apologies, stumbles in. Helaine looks up at him. He’s a little gawky, with a gentle, open face, but a nice-looking boy without the standoffish pose she sees in a lot of her black students. “You’re lucky, you’re my last of the day—I can stay late,” she says, clipped but affable. She taps him on the shoulder to sit down.

  In a moment, she fires off a long list of questions, her clipboard poised: any allergies? any family members prematurely gray? any relatives who stutter? She then asks Cedric to write a sentence so she can carefully examine the way he holds his pencil.

  These are some of the strange, medicine-man tests to identify learning disabilities. For most of her charges, she quickly identifies some strain of learning disability (a broadly applicable label) that allows them special provisions for test-taking and general classwork.

  “Have you ever had any trouble in school?” she asks, because she hasn’t hit any obvious LD markers. “Always a good student?”

  “I guess,” he shrugs.

  “Well, in any case,” she says, putting aside her clipboard, “let’s talk about your writing.”

  In a phone call earlier in the week, she told Cedric to bring some papers on which he is now working. Today’s session comes a few weeks after midterms, and he’s carrying two major midsemester papers that are due next week. He tells her he’s been working on the papers since early October, writing and rewriting, and he’s even gone to the student writing office to spruce them up. He hands over his latest draft of the shorter one, an analysis of a Richard Wright sho
rt story, “Fire and Cloud.”

  “Are you satisfied with this?” she asks after reading it.

  “Naw. Not really. It doesn’t say what I want real well,” he mumbles.

  “Well, it’s really not too bad,” she says. She’s heard from Donald that his writing has moved from abysmal to poor and she figures he must have been working furiously on prose since he arrived.

  She begins reading the paper aloud in the reedy, Hepburnish voice of a diction coach, picking up a few grammatical errors, tense changes, and some sentences that need reworking. The paper is only two pages, and she soon crests toward the end. Wright’s main character, Reverend Taylor, brings the short story to a climax when he leads a march of blacks and whites through a small town.

  Cedric, having been fed a rich brew of Martin Luther King integrationism by Barbara since birth, responds to the story’s finale in a heartfelt way.

  “‘When Wright wrote this,’” Helaine reads from Cedric’s conclusion, “‘the idea of strong whites and strong blacks, marching side by side, was wildly implausible. The story is intended to be inspirational, like a dream of what could be.’”

  She pauses, letting that last, moving line seep in. “Cedric, I think that’s a nice paper.”

  He laughs like he’s embarrassed, but she detects that it’s really relief. They work over some changes she’s noted along the way, and then she says, emphatically, “Show me another!”

  He pulls out the big midterm paper for History of Education. She asks who his professor is. “James,” he tells her.

  “Oh yes, he’s very good,” she says, and again reads it to herself and then aloud. The assignment is to elucidate and analyze your “family educational tree.”

  She immediately sees that this gives Cedric another sterling opportunity to write passionately—to simply write what he feels. He opens with the journey north by his grandparents, who, Helaine reads aloud, “‘thought little about education. Marriage and having a family were enough. In 1940, my grandparents were united in holy matrimony. From this union there were ten children, five girls and five boys. With only a third grade and grade school education, respectively, Grampy and Granny had nothing to offer their ten children but God, love, and a roof over their head.

  “‘At sixteen, my mother got pregnant with my older sister, Nanette Jennings,’” she reads aloud. “‘The pregnancy came at a crucial time in her life. She was beginning to get her life together and realize her dreams. Education was her only way out. When the teachers and principal at her school found out she was pregnant, they forbade her to come back. They thought that it was a disgrace and that she was setting a poor example for the other students. So she dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year and ended up on welfare.

  “‘At twenty-five, she got pregnant again with my other sister, Leslie Jennings. This time she made up her mind to go back to school. During this time, high school graduates were the only recipients of decent jobs.’”

  “Cedric, you can make it tighter by cutting, ‘During this time,’” Helaine says, crossing out that phrase.

  “Okay, then,” he says.

  “‘She was going to do whatever it took to take good care of her children. After six months she earned her GED. This opened up many doors for her to gain work in the government. After passing the civil service test, she received work at the General Accounting Office.

  “‘At this time, my sisters were well into grade school. That’s when she began dating my father. Cedric Gilliam was a guy from around the neighborhood. He was very intelligent. In addition to graduating from high school, he has a bachelor’s degree in urban studies, business management, and ecological studies from the University of the District of Columbia.’”

  Cedric begins to laugh, high-pitched and nervous. Helaine looks back down at the page.

  “‘He had also been incarcerated for narcotics distribution and armed robbery. That was not smart,’” she reads, dispassionately.

  “That was crazy,” Cedric blurts out. “Right?”

  It’s a tragic story, and she feels his embarrassment.

  “Yes, Cedric, that was crazy,” she says, softly.

  “‘In 1977, I was born. My father was long gone and my mother was left with a broken heart.’”

  Helaine stops reading. Her detachment has dissolved. She glances up at him, but he’s already staring at the blank white wall, looking a little flushed. She takes a deep breath and pushes on.

  “‘In search for strength and restoration, she attended a revival meeting. It was there that she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior. She then became actively involved in church activities. Because of her strong interest in God and the way she lived, I was imparted with the same beliefs. She is a social missionary and sings in the choir. Even if I had not been interested in church, she would have still made me participate. My Christian heritage and education go hand and hand.’”

  “That should be ‘hand in hand,’” she says quickly, not wanting to stop the flow of her reading.

  “‘I was always taught in church that education is the way. My pastor would always say, people fail because of a lack of knowledge. This knowledge included God’s world and important information that can help anyone better society. I consider myself blessed because, between me and my sisters, I am the first to graduate from high school and go on to college …. I thank God for giving me a mother who could give me discipline and at the same time help me find answers to my dreams.’”

  Helaine places the paper on the desk, cocks her head, and squints at him.

  “This is a beautiful paper. Yes, there are a few problems, grammatical things, some sentence structure, some punctuation, but, on balance, it’s very strong and compelling.”

  “You really think so?” Cedric asks. “You really do, don’t you?”

  Helaine helps him rewrite a few awkward sentences and sets up a time for next week. In a moment, he’s out the door and rushing off to dinner.

  Later that night, while she’s loading the dishwasher in her kitchen and her husband is upstairs in the third-floor study with his econometric tomes, she turns Cedric’s two papers over in her head.

  She realizes it will be difficult to keep her distance from this one. She recalls a phrase from the first paper—“a dream of what could be”—and smiles. In the second, he gave all credit to his mother’s discipline and the transforming qualities of faith, which is something most kids would feel self-conscious writing about. It’s exciting to work with a kid who is so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying. While it’s not going to be easy to get him to where he needs to be academically, Cedric simply can’t afford to fail. He’s got everything—God, mother, faith—riding on making it. The thought makes her short of breath.

  No, those papers weren’t the type of smart, dispassionate exposition he’ll need to excel, not the kind of collegiate prose that attaches carefully qualified examples to broad principles. Yet, because Helaine is granted access to the shadowy realm of how professors actually grade papers, she knows a secret, and it offers her some conditional hope. Affirmative action can be subtly woven into grading. Cedric will get good marks on both papers because he found a way to squeeze his inspirational feelings into each assignment. To mark him down would be to mark him down as a person.

  While the more typical Brown students will need to master the models for smooth explication and elegant grammar to excel, Cedric can ride on his strong and unique “personal perspective.” A tale of overcoming oppression sells here and almost everywhere.

  She turns out the kitchen light, grabs a handful of papers from other students that she’ll review in bed, and begins to ascend the steps. No, in future classes on more diverse and unfamiliar subjects, Cedric’s advantage will certainly decrease, she decides. At least for now, though, he’s been able to find ways to rely on his bursting heart.

  An addendum is needed to the music rules. An exception, really. Both Rob and Cedric know this, but they’ve held out, n
ot sure how to bring it up. The problem is bladder size. If one of them leaves the room to go to the bathroom, he risks losing music control. So, one evening in the second week of November, with Sting’s “Fields of Gold” quietly playing, Rob brings it up, and they quickly agree that bathroom runs don’t count.

  On the rainy afternoon of November 14, Cedric wanders back to the room after finishing his Richard Wright class, visiting the science library, and running a few errands. He throws his bookbag on the desk and flops onto his bed, his head near the TV.

  Cedric’s face becomes hard and tight, like a death mask, when he glances at Rob. Phillip and any number of kids who taunted him through Ballou’s hallways left their scars. He knows that, just as he knows that those days are slipping further into memory. But Rob seems to be picking at the scars, even though his white, doctor’s son demeanor couldn’t be further from that of tormentors of the past who were always in his face.

  Rob just ignores him. And that seems, somehow, worse. There he is, just sitting on his bed doing a chemistry homework sheet and listening to REM, the Georgia rockers on his own CD player.

  A week ago, Cedric took his CD player from the trunk in the middle of the room and set it up on a shelf over his bed. He mumbled that Rob’s “side of the room” was “such a disaster that the stereo could get broken over in all that mess.”

  Rob didn’t argue. He went home that weekend to the large colonial in Marblehead and brought back two stereos, one for his side of the room and another he can carry to the lounge or wherever he pleases. With that act, Rob completed a division of property, of once shared items that included Rob’s hair clippers and the phone (Rob now makes and receives calls from friends’ rooms).

  But they can’t go back to being strangers.

  Cedric looks at his watch, five o’clock on the nose. He turns on the TV. Much of his free time is spent in front of the tube. The P.T. Barnum—I like talk shows—at their lurid peak in the fall of 1995—are a staple. He has first-name relationships, sometimes admiring, sometimes acrid, with Oprah, his favorite, and also with Montel, Sally, Jenny, Richard, Gordon, Jerry, Tempest, and Ricki, whom he now flips to.