by Ron Suskind
“Cedric, could you turn it down a little,” Rob says, not looking up from the chemistry worksheet resting on his legs. Cedric turns it down a barely discernible notch.
Rob leaves the room for a moment and leaves his music on. Cedric assumes it falls under the bathroom exception, though Rob didn’t abide by subprovisions about notification. Cedric takes advantage of this gray area and momentarily turns up his beloved Sony Trinitron. Rob returns, notices the amplified TV, and turns his stereo up a few clicks as he passes it on the way back to bed.
Cedric, his ear practically against the screen, turns the TV up a tad to compete with Rob. Rob gets up and turns his stereo even louder.
Cedric looks up. Rob, nonconfrontational to the last, is already back on his bed, as though nothing has happened. Like Cedric is invisible or something. He purses his lips.
The volume knob on the TV goes to full blast. Ricki’s whining voice blares across the open air. The agile Rob leaps up and cranks his stereo to pain-decibel levels.
The Trinitron can’t compete, but Cedric knows what can. He jumps to his feet and flips on his stereo, blasting a local hip-hop radio station. LL Cool J’s “Hey Lover” overwhelms REM’s “Losing My Religion.”
The walls are shaking as the two boys stare at each other, wide-eyed and stunned.
Rob busts into the hall and disappears, while Cedric, shaken, flees for the peer counselor’s room.
Cedric is fortunate to find Rachel Edy sitting at her desk. She’s called “Rock” by Unit 15ers and is the most respected of the East Andrews counselors. Rachel is solid and attentive, a natural listener. She knows that penetrating a roommate dispute is roughly equivalent to getting inside a failed marriage: next to impossible.
But some matters need to be dealt with immediately. And they are. She and Cedric talk late into the night. And a week later, Cedric has New York Undercover, a Fox TV favorite starring a black detective, cranked to a healthy volume. Rob hums contentedly on his bed, wearing $100 earphones.
As the end of November nears, Zayd is busy. A racy script he wrote in intermediate playwriting drew raves, and he’s been telling people that a pretty brunette junior in the class “made it known that she’s available.” Then, there are the ongoing social demands of “Bear’s posse,” a group of sophomores who hang around Bear and are always itching for adventure. Beyond that, there’s professor Bernard Reginster, the youngish, Belgian philosophy professor who wears black boots, black jeans, and stylish little octagonal bifocals. Zayd (like most everyone in the three-hundred-seat lecture hall for Existentialism) thinks Reginster is about the coolest human being anywhere. He’s trying to figure out a way to bump into him somewhere, in a real casual way, and talk about philosophy.
Still, there’s time to knock once in a while on the door of room 216 and pull Cedric out. “Come on, C,” Zayd says on a chilly Sunday night a few days before Thanksgiving break. “Let’s get off College Hill and hit a mall.”
Bear and his white 1992 Chevy Blazer are otherwise occupied, so they catch a ride with another friend. Zayd is in the back seat, humming along to “Gangster’s Paradise,” the new hit by Coolio. Cedric bobs along to the rapper with Medusa-like hair.
“You ever think about things you went through when you were little?” Cedric offers, head nodding to the beat.
Zayd loves it when Cedric asks innocent questions like that; they draw out memories or feelings that Zayd has shelved as unsophisticated.
“Sure, all the time,” says Zayd. He spins into stories about when he lived on 127th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in upper Manhattan around the time his parents were coming out of hiding. His mom had been arrested for suspicion of having some involvement in the Brinks truck robbery in Nyack, New York, where two cops and a security guard were killed. Mostly, it was just that she was friendly from her revolutionary days with Kathy Boudin, a radical who’d been involved in the robbery. Bernadine was released after a year without charges—not long after she did an exclusive interview with Phil Donahue from her jail cell—and she and his dad started on the path to getting the credentials that would ultimately serve them well in the years to come. But it was a slow start. They lived in a gritty apartment, and Zayd was one of the only white kids at a tough P.S. on the edge of Harlem. He tells Cedric he was “thoroughly trashed by this kid who was two years older than me, a black kid who was huge. And I remember when it came time to move up to fourth grade and about half the class was held back, and he was one of them, I was so happy.”
While the attention of a white listener might be piqued by the idea of half a class of black third graders being held back, Cedric, familiar with such pervasive failure, sees something else.
“How can you get beat up by all these black kids but not end up hating black people?” he prods.
Zayd simply loves fielding Cedric’s prickly asides, many of them full of explosive charges. It makes him feel like he’s walking an exhilarating minefield between racial encampments.
“You can’t hate everyone because of what some people do,” says Zayd. “Everyone’s different. They could’ve just as easily been tough white kids.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Cedric says coyly. “There ain’t no real difference—there are black people that don’t like other black people as much as they don’t like white people.”
Both smirk at that, Cedric spinning the all-people-are-the-same idea on its head. “Take Clarence Thomas,” Cedric says. “He seems to be upset at a whole lot of people.”
Zayd just loves this, too, the way Cedric takes him on a tour of what Zayd figures is the “real” black viewpoint.
A bit later, eating chicken fingers at the mall, Cedric lets on that he’s actually met Justice Thomas, and Zayd, having met his share of celebrities, knows how to be reserved in his reaction (“Oh, really?”) but then artfully prods Cedric for more: “Did he talk about his penis?”
“Just shows, you going after the black man again,” Cedric says, and Zayd knows he’s playing.
“No, he talked about coming up, about being poor, talking ‘gitchee’—which is like a country slang—when he was young and how he had to learn to talk properly and how hard that was.” Cedric pauses and glances over at Zayd, who looks at him anxiously, waiting for something choicer. “Oh yeah,” Cedric relents, “and his hair was beady.”
Zayd: “What’s beady mean? It that like nappy?”
Cedric: “No, no. With nappy, your hair is clean, just shooting out all over the place. Beady is when you don’t brush your hair. They call it buckshot. Like you’re not clean. Like your hair is all oily. And he was wearing one of those cheap shower watches, like a Casio—one of those five-dollar things. I couldn’t believe it, here’s a Supreme Court Justice wearing this.”
Cedric adds: “You know, he’s married to a white woman.”
“She’s an ugly woman,” Zayd says definitively, though he can’t remember what she looks like.
“And he wears these squeaky shoes,” says Cedric, “and smokes these cheap cigars.”
“Sounds like a seedy character,” Zayd says, only half joking, and Cedric lets it lie.
To Zayd, Cedric seems so authentic in his feelings, his faith, his resentments, his finely woven codes of right and wrong. He seems to have these dense, profound dilemmas, where Zayd just dabbles in anything he can find. And there’s one other thing: Zayd likes the way Cedric reserves friendship until it is arduously won. It makes everything, now, seem more valuable.
By now, Cedric has confided in Zayd—told him things he has told no one else at Brown. About his father being in jail, about moving year to year as a child, about the blistered drug supermarket of V Street where he ended up. Zayd respects these confidences (though unit mates are anxious to know more about Cedric), and he makes his own offering in return. Dropping by, sometimes after a late night of partying, alcohol on his breath, he tells Cedric about his ongoing adventures—a fight he almost got into with a townie on one night, an older girl, a senior, who invited him back to her
apartment for a very private party on another—taking Cedric along in a way. So a dialectic is established between one kid with no boundaries and the other with nothing but.
They walk through the mall together, ducking into a Nike store and then wandering through the atrium of ferns and benches. In a few days, Zayd will be flying home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and he’s wondering about two girls, Cami and Camoun, two stunning French girls who are friends from high school. He can’t seem to choose between them. He tells Cedric that “Cami told me that if I see Camoun again, she won’t see me anymore, but I really like them both. I mean, I think I can pull it off and see them both, I just have to be careful. They’re both just amazing girls …. I showed you the pictures, right?”
“Yeah, they’re fine looking,” Cedric says, nodding his head in assent. “But that’s not the point. You should make a choice and stick by it. Listen, trust is something you have to practice. Someday you’re going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you’re doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people’s trust.”
Amazing, Zayd thinks. Where does Cedric come by this stuff? How? He laughs, shaking his head. “Come on, C, there’s a Record Town around the corner. Let’s go put on some earphones.”
Which is what they do—hopping for the next half-hour through new releases at the CD listening stations that rim the walls at Record Town.
They’ll have to be heading back soon, so they grab a couple of Cokes and drink them at a candy-striped table in the food court. Zayd is feeling expansive and tells Cedric about Thanksgiving: a big show at his house, with thirty-five family members and friends, and how every year he likes to go with his father out to shoot a quail or a pheasant. Zayd’s grandfather on his dad’s side (a patrician who was chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison Power) taught Zayd how to hunt. Zayd’s dad doesn’t much like the pheasant hunting—and Bernadine, a strident gun control advocate, thoroughly hates it—but Zayd keeps it up anyway, pressing his father to go. “It’s a family tradition and all, so they have to let me do it—but it drives my mom and dad a little crazy,” Zayd says with glee, neatly wrapping the whole story around his core issue of how to rebel against two legendary rebels. “Shooting the gun is wild—the boom really pops in your ears.”
Cedric begins to laugh hysterically. Zayd looks at him uneasily, toying with a suspicion that his winding tale seems frivolous to Cedric, who struggles with diamond-hard dilemmas.
But Zayd quickly realizes Cedric’s amusement with him is genuine. It’s just that beneath his friend’s eager smile, lava flows.
“Talking about all that shooting,” Cedric says, riotously, practically falling off the white, curled-iron chair, barely able to breathe. “It made me think … yeah … think how I miss Washington, I miss the gunfire, I miss the guys on the street corner. I miss my miserable neighborhood ….” His eyes are tearing with laughter. “Oh yes. ‘Bye Washington! I won’t be back for Thanksgiving this year ….”
Cedric pauses on the top step and looks to the right of the wide, carved-oak door. KORB, it says, in large letters on a golden plaque. He looks left and right down the empty corridor of the tall brick houses of Brimmer Street on Beacon Hill through the branches of sycamore trees lining the cobblestones. Then he gently reaches out, running his long fingers on the straight back of the K. It must be gold, he figures, what else? He snaps out of the trance and lifts the heavy door knocker, letting it drop once. In a moment, a short, owlish man is standing before him.
“Cedric!” he shouts, loud enough that a house full of people might hear. “Welcome. Come, come in.”
He waves Cedric across the threshold and reaches up to hug him.
“Hi, Dr. Korb,” Cedric says with a bemused smile. “Thanks for having me and all.”
“Oh, Cedric,” Donald Korb says, pulling back from their embrace. “Having you for Thanksgiving is an honor.” His o stretches in a thick, upper-crusty Boston accent. “You are our special guest.”
Those words are barely out when Cedric suddenly realizes there are twenty people—at least twenty!—jammed into the foyer, and more coming down the wide staircase to greet him.
His smile freezes at its widest arc. With only a few seconds before they descend on him, Cedric slips out of his furry black vest—Donald quickly grabs it—and drops his bookbag full of clothes.
Then he’s surrounded and nodding vigorously, receiving each well-wisher as they clutch his hand, or both hands, a few hugging him, everyone glistening as though they’re being reunited with an old, dear friend.
They all know of him. Donald talks about Cedric often. Cedric tries to keep names straight but gives up after half a dozen and floats upstairs on a wave of back slaps and bursting smiles.
“Oh, hello Cedric,” says Donald’s attractive wife, Joan, her back against the marble peninsula counter in the second-floor kitchen. “It’s so nice to see you. Can we get you something to drink?”
“Ginger ale would be just fine. And, yeah, and thanks for having me, Mrs. Korb …. I mean, I can’t believe I’m here.”
It’s Thanksgiving afternoon, 1995, and Cedric Jennings has never been this far from home. From the bottom of America to the top. Inasmuch as Southeast Washington or Harlem or Watts are shadowlands in the minds of most Americans, Beacon Hill, along with Park Avenue and Nob Hill, is well known as a sunlit peak.
While the Korbs’ neighbors include Stephen Roosevelt, FDR’s grandson, and Edward “Ned” Johnson, chairman and, with his family, majority owner of mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, Donald is part of the new wealth on the block. He went from very comfortable to beyond that around 1978, when one of his companies (and its patents, which improved the production process of soft contact lenses) was bought by a company that is now part of Hoffman-LaRoche.
That was when he started, in earnest, to buy roomfuls of fine antiques, transforming four stories and four thousand square feet of homey spaciousness into a palace.
Donald is a busybody and gadabout, priding himself on knowing more people from more strata of society than an “old money” neighbor would meet in three lifetimes. And he somehow manages to keep in close touch with most of them.
Including Cedric. He called Brown three days ago to make sure Cedric was coming for Thanksgiving. Cedric hesitated, but Donald insisted he come. The optometrist, in fact, calls Cedric every couple of weeks and, on the fifteenth of every month, like clockwork, sends Cedric a check for $200.
He also sends notes—lots of them. Though Donald travels often, raising money to seed new ventures for his latest company, Ocular Research of Boston, he manages to launch a flurry of missives to Cedric. For a man who enjoys soaring rhetoric and winding philosophical discussions, he is oddly precise. Makes copies of everything.
The notes to Cedric are particularly winning and affectionate. They might contain some thought Donald had in passing when, say, he was teaching a course at the University of California, Berkeley, last year or traveling to Australia to meet potential investors. They all end with little boosters like “Be Strong!” or “Never lose faith” and always the salutation “Love, Donald.”
But beyond that, he and Cedric have only met once, when Cedric was at MIT. Donald came by and gave him a pep talk about getting conditioned for the academic competition ahead, just like a fighter might prepare for a fight.
This afternoon is their second face-to-face encounter.
“You know, Cedric’s mother went on welfare for a few years when he was two,” Donald tells his brother-in-law, Jerry, a doctor, as Cedric stands mutely between them in the living room. “When I heard that, it just spun everything on its head. Just look at the outcome. She had her priorities right.”
Cedric realizes they’re both looking at him—wanting some response—and he nods an enthusiastic affirmation. He takes a sip of ginger ale and looks over his right shoulder at a ten-foot-high oil painting (from his midcalf to the ceiling) of a plump boy in a gold-leaf frame. It’s like
the ones he saw in museums as a kid, he thinks, old portraits with puffy, pale people staring straight ahead. He’s eye to eye with the painting’s imperious, princely lad. “What you lookin’ at?” he murmurs to the fat face.
“ … I agree, it’s just so awful that there’s so much division in our society,” Jerry says to Donald, but to Cedric, too.
“Oh yes,” Cedric says, spinning to attention, his face a mask of earnestness. “So much division.”
Donald excuses himself and moves to a central spot in the sumptuous living room to give a toast, holding out his crystal glass of white wine. He thanks “everyone for coming, for partaking of the bounty, including our special guest … ”
Cedric—his black jeans and long-sleeved black pullover shirt conspicuous in a sea of khakis and blazers, a long piece of celery with goat cheese (he hates goat cheese) dangling from his long fingers—offers a sickly smile to the unctuous eyes.
Toast completed, Donald sees his special guest standing unaccompanied before the painting and hurries back over, asking about Barbara, about what she’s doing today.
“I think she might still be at home,” Cedric says. In a moment, the portable phone is coming his way and Cedric is reciting the number—a new one Barbara just got when she finagled back her service.
“Hello?”
“Ma, it’s me.”
“Lavar? Where you calling from? You at Dr. Korb’s?”
“Yeah … it’s real nice and all.”
Cedric asks what she’s got planned and she says she’ll be going to church and then to her sister Chris’s for some dinner—but he already knew that from a conversation they had just two days ago following Dr. Korb’s call.
“Remember what I told you, Lavar,” she says. “Watch what everyone does first. Which fork they use on what, how they manner themselves. Okay? Then do what they do.”
