A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  “Yeah, I know,” he says, looking up furtively, wondering if anyone can decipher what his mom’s talking to him about. She listens to the self-conscious silence, and neither of them say anything as he presses the receiver harder against his ear.

  “You know I love you, Lavar,” she says.

  “Yeah, me too.” He’s unable to say more. “Okay, well ’bye.” And he passes the phone to Donald, who wants to talk to Barbara, too.

  Soon, the crowd ambles downstairs to the first-floor dining hall and settles into two tables, one a traditional dining room eight-seater and the other a long Arthurian monstrosity. It has room for a dozen on each flank, and Cedric slides into a middle chair next to Donald’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Cindy.

  Many of those seated at Cedric’s table are youngish Korb cousins—college age or slightly older—who launch into cross-table discussions about their college majors or first jobs over the pumpkin soup appetizer.

  Cedric looks down at the soup, then at Cindy to his right and, to his left, at a young, dark-haired woman, either Spanish or French, he’s not sure, who looks like one of those Euromodels he sees in magazines. Okay, big one’s the soup spoon. He takes a taste of the orangish puree, doesn’t like it, cleans the spoon on the napkin in his lap and puts it back next to the teaspoon.

  “So, what’s your major, Cedric,” asks Donald’s niece, Caroline, a tall blonde at the University of Pennsylvania. “I mean, do you have one yet?”

  Cedric pauses. Every eye at the table is on him. He feels like a circus act. His mind races. Of course, he hasn’t really decided.

  “I’m triple majoring,” he says. “Computer science, math, and education.”

  Swoons up and down. Whoa. Wow. “Hey, that’s amazing,” says Caroline’s brother, the hunky, good-natured Jonathan, a senior at Middlebury College. He brushes back the brown hair that hangs over his oxford button-down collar. “God, you must be soooo smart.”

  Nods and harrumphs all around, and Cedric smiles, feeling like an impostor.

  An avalanche of food follows—all the traditional favorites, including a thirty-two-pound turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and candied yams. Cedric nibbles, quietly, his appetite blunted by the knot in his gut.

  The Euromodel asks: “So, do you like your roommate?”

  “No, we don’t get along.”

  From across the table: “Cedric? Do you usually have a big turkey for Thanksgiving?”

  “No, ummm, well, like a chicken sometimes and potato salad and macaroni and cheese … ”

  At that point, Cindy begins chattering at him nonstop—about her life, her hopes of becoming a TV news reporter, asking Cedric questions but not waiting for answers. Cedric thinks, God, she talks a lot, but he’s happy to just smile and nod his head at her for cover.

  Suddenly, she stops. “Do you have enough to eat, Cedric?”

  He looks down at his plate, still half full. “Yeah … I’m fine.”

  A minute later, he’s asked again, this time by Joan Korb, passing by with a turkey platter. “No … No … Mrs. Korb, I’m fine, really.”

  He starts to lightly perspire, feeling the wall right behind him, his abdomen against the huge table, chairs tight on both sides. His brain catches fire: Is everyone worrying whether the poor black kid has enough to eat?!

  Dusk arrives and things loosen a bit as people get up and mill about in a break before dessert. Donald slides in next to Cedric and talks easily with him for a few minutes, asking about problems with Rob, Helaine’s sessions, how classes are going, whether a particular paper Cedric mentioned has come back. Cedric exhales a bit and talks unselfconsciously. He likes Dr. Korb. The older man’s relentless good works and attentiveness has provided him passage across Cedric’s minefield of trust. Cedric is always honest with Dr. Korb. Well, almost.

  “So, how did you like those suits I sent you, the ones from Filene’s?”

  Cedric looks back at him in disbelief, thinking, Did he really just ask me that? What a day.

  Already numb from the festivities, he lies like a pro. “Oh, the suits …. I love them. They were great. I mean they are great.”

  Donald goes off to talk to Jerry and another guest, and Cedric catches an ancient woman sizing him up from across the table.

  It’s Donald’s aunt, Miriam, a ninety-two-year-old white eminence in a black shawl who, during introductions hours back, mentioned how she was “a pioneer, too,” as one of the first women to graduate from New York University Law School in 1927. “I only went there ’cause the jerks at Columbia didn’t accept women.”

  As he looks at her now, Cedric is reminded of some of the very old black women at church, whose wisdom seems to grow the older they get, as they keep watching the world pass.

  “I sure would like to meet your mother,” she says, smiling at him. “She must be quite a woman.”

  Cedric feels a warmth come over him. “Oh yes, Mrs. Korb … ”

  “Miriam.”

  “ … Okay, I mean Miriam, my mom is something really special,” and he talks for a while about Barbara, about Thanksgivings they’ve had, sometimes just the two of them.

  “I bet you miss her today.”

  “How d’jou know?”

  “Because we old ladies have nothing else to do but get smart.”

  Cedric lets out a big heaving laugh and, for a moment, he feels completely comfortable.

  “So what’s with a freshman having three majors,” she asks coyly, having overheard the earlier exchange.

  “I sure like saying it.”

  “You keep saying it, and let all their jaws drop. Saying things can sometimes make them happen.”

  “All right,” he agrees, and, with that, Cedric gets his bearings back. Enough, at least, to get him through dessert—the Indian pudding, pumpkin cheesecake, and pumpkin pie.

  During languid second and third cups of coffee and tea, David Korb tells everyone a raucous tale of a Spanish emigré friend—Juanito, who once attended Thanksgiving here—and how he got lost in New York, “running uptown and downtown in his yellow shorts, yellow T-shirt, camera strapped around his neck dripping with sweat … yelling to himself, ‘Where am I, how did I get here?’” The room descends into hysterics, and Cedric laughs overly hard, doubling over, to make certain no one will suspect he’s been wondering the same thing all night.

  People finally leave the tables, clustering off, some to watch football or flop into deep, soft chairs. Cedric goes to the bathroom, giving everyone the slip, and then tiptoes into a hallway near the front foyer where he half listens to Donald talking to his brother-in-law Jerry and another adult guest: “What is the ultimate expression of a man’s egotism?” Donald asks, not aware that Cedric is nearby. “I mean, some egotism may be wrapped up in what I do for Cedric, what I do supporting kids who need it. But no! The ultimate egotism, more broadly, is a belief in the existence of God … though, rationally, there is no way to get there from here. Faith, in a way, is egotism. I know it’s at the center of Cedric’s life, what keeps him going. But ultimately, it can’t get him where he needs to be … he needs to find his place through reason, not faith, a place in the world of men, not just in some imagined kingdom of heaven.”

  Cedric’s ears perk up when he hears his name, but he’s not sure what the point of it is. It’s okay that Donald talks about him—he’s allowed to, he’s given a lot to Cedric and deeply cares about him—but so much that the older man says is indecipherable.

  Soon it is time to go. Donald is going to give him a ride to Cambridge, where Cedric will visit some friends from the MIT program who are now at Harvard. Everyone rouses from their sated, full-bellied stupors to say good-bye, and, this time, Cedric moves quickly through the line. He’s grateful. Really. Everyone does wish him well, and they seem to care about him, especially Donald’s wife and children. But appropriate responses and emotions are bottled up in him, jumbled and inaccessible, and it makes him feel guilty and anxious to flee. He slips on his fuzzy vest, grabs his backpack, r
aises a hand of farewell to all, and turns toward the door.

  Miriam is blocking his exit. He looks down—she can’t come much past his belly button. She reaches up her arms as he bends way forward. “You’re gonna be fine,” she whispers in his ear, and he really hugs her.

  He straightens up after a bit, thankful to be facing just her and the door. And then he’s out into the cool November night.

  The trip to Harvard Square is swift, just across the Charles River, and he and Donald make small talk. Donald’s complex advice about achievement and self-awareness often leaves Cedric vexed, but his gravelly voice sounds soothing to the boy and makes him feel at ease. He’ll call in a few days, he tells Cedric as he drops him off. They hug, awkwardly, across the Saab’s shift.

  Harvard Yard is all but empty tonight. He’s looking for Thayer Hall, but there’s no one to direct him. Like at Brown, most students can manage a brief trip home, and the ones who can’t are usually adopted by roommates or friends. Those left behind tend to be poor kids who live far away, many of them minorities.

  And so Cedric races around the echoing yard, searching the labyrinth of dorms for a few such refugees—namely, Mark McIntosh and his twin sister, Belinda.

  After half an hour, he’s becoming frantic. It’s not just that he’s supposed to sleep there tonight. It’s more than that. He feels like he’s been on a strange journey—confusing, exhilarating, bizarre—and home is wherever black people are.

  Fifteen sweaty minutes later, he thinks he’s bumped into the right dorm. He punches a room number on the intercom plate alongside the locked exterior door.

  Nothing. Then a grainy sound. It’s Mark’s voice coming through.

  “NIGGER?!” Cedric screams, a word he almost never uses. “That you!?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Mark says through the static. “Calm down.”

  “I’m stranded out here. Oh Gaaaawd, come get me!”

  Professor Tom James cleans his desk, preparing for office hours and a steady stream of students. Now, at the end of the semester, there’s always much to do: students wanting advice on final projects or wanting to argue, in advance, about expected final grades; advisees stopping by for counseling; or students majoring in education who simply need his signature because he’s chairman of the department.

  “Buenos días,” Franklin Cruz says, ducking his head in.

  “Hola. ¿Como estas,” says Tom, delighted.

  “Más o menos,” Franklin says, offering a shrug, though Tom knows he’s just being modest. Franklin is Tom’s freshman advisee and a star student. His family emigrated from a rural section of the Dominican Republic to a neighborhood on the edge of Harlem, and Franklin was tapped as a sixth grader into Prep for Prep. He went on to thrive at the exclusive Collegiate Preparatory School in Manhattan.

  Getting comfortable in Tom’s office, Franklin floats an idea for an independent study project for next semester—the classifying of urban minority students as “special needs,” a technique that allows educators to steer toward them funds that are guaranteed by federal statute for handicapped children. “Terrific, it’s a very provocative issue,” says Tom, who mentions some studies that are already underway on the issue. Eventually, they discuss Franklin’s final project this semester about comparisons of integrated secondary schools with segregated ones. When he gave an oral presentation on it last week in class with his partner, Cedric, Franklin was at his light-footed, multilingual best. He managed to match the hues of his own journey with those of a wider American canvas, bloodlessly and analytically connecting his own experiences with broader trends.

  It’s what Franklin does so well, Tom muses, as he listens to the polished student expound. Not that Franklin denies his Latino heritage—a mortal sin at a place like Brown, where group identity is celebrated by 160 different student groups, many of them aligned along ethnic or racial lines. But, take it one level down, and Franklin, like most students at Brown, is artfully accommodationist in his character. In just a few months, Brown has helped him to intellectualize his Latino status, to make it portable, something he can take out, and wear, when needed. Here, he’s encouraged to wear it a lot, whether in class discussions or social engagements. But underneath the public posture, Franklin, like so many of Brown’s upwardly mobile minority students, is becoming skilled in the many dialects he’ll need to get ahead. He’s slowly cutting away some of his cultural ethnicity as he cuts a deal with the broader American society he expects to enter. The process is gradual but steady, causing changes he may not notice until after he’s graduated. In the meantime, he can assuage assimilationist guilt by hanging out with Latino kids at the VeeDub and going to salsa dances at Machado, the Spanish House.

  All of it fascinates Tom. For years, he has written scholarly tomes about education of the minorities, from analysis of how the children of Japanese Americans interned during WWII were schooled, to a complex assessment of how statutory changes at the turn of the century allowed immigrant minorities—in those days Jews, Italians, and Irish—access to education. Thick books, respected in the field. But some of his freshest insights come haphazardly, from observing students who pass through his office and classroom.

  Later that afternoon, after meeting with a procession of students, Tom has a free moment to poke along the aged cedar shelves lining one wall for a book he’s been thinking about.

  He sits back down with Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale and flips through some favorite parts about how certain professors at Yale in the 1920s and 1930s reached out to ostracized Jewish students, ushering them into Yale’s pristine hallways. He skims through a section about how the Jews arrived, giving up their religious orthodoxy to adopt a sort of liberal cosmopolitanism, giving over, in a way, to the same assimilatory currents that Franklin is being swept forward by. It wasn’t entirely a one-way street. Ultimately, Yale had to bend to accommodate new ways of thinking and learning from a more diverse student body. It was a dialogue, a push and shove. And it’s going on today, as black, Latino, and Asian kids try to match their cultural perspectives with rigid standards of merit that predate their arrival.

  Tom admires those old Yale professors and desperately wants to fill a similar role for outsiders of his own time, students who, he thinks, carry a heavier burden with skin color than their predecessors ever faced with their less conspicuous ethnicities.

  As he prepares to leave in the late afternoon, there’s a knock on the door. Tom looks up. “Oh, Cedric. Please come in, sit down.”

  The student seems sheepish. He enters gingerly and slips into a wooden armchair with its varnish worn to an aged gloss.

  “Professor James, you see, I’ll be leaving for home in just a few days and I just need you to sign this request for me to be in that Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education for next semester,” Cedric says. “I think it’d get me off College Hill and, like, it might be good to do researching at a school in Providence, which, I guess, is what you do in that class.”

  “I think it would be just right for you, Cedric,” Tom says as the student passes a form across his desk.

  “How’s your semester been?” he asks with a by-the-way casualness as he looks down to sign the form.

  “All right, I guess. I’m taking everything pass/fail and I’ll pass everything … but I feel kind of lost sometimes.”

  “That’s not uncommon for a freshman at this point,” Tom says, looking up, trying to be encouraging, though he knows—and suspects Cedric does as well—that what this student faces is far more confusing and complicated than most. “Just stay with it and it will become easier.”

  Cedric smiles. “Yeah, right … ,” and then begins rambling about maybe majoring in education along with math.

  The juxtaposition of Cedric and Franklin causes Tom to squirm. He knows Cedric mostly from his papers, especially the family tree paper where he so boldly revealed how faith is at the center of his life, and from a few times he’s spoken up in class. Cedric is not accommodationist. He is bl
ack and urban, a church kid from the inner city and, at this point, still culturally fixed, always in his shoes. He can’t step away from it, can’t intellectualize it, because it’s still too close, too visceral. It’s why so many kids like him—passionate, sometimes angry kids—fail here.

  “ … so, Professor James,” Cedric finishes up, “I was thinking maybe of education as part of a dual major might be good for me.”

  Tom nods and looks closely at the student, scanning the bags under his red eyes for clues to his inner life. He imagines how obtuse and disconnected Cedric must feel. He wants to ask if he’s found a church in Providence, about how things are going in the dorm, but he feels uneasy prying into those realms.

  “I think that would be just fine, Cedric, but it’s still early to declare a major. Let’s keep talking about it as you go forward.”

  Cedric has what he needs and rises, putting the signed form in his bookbag.

  Tom rises, too, fumphering. “You’ll come see me, right? If there’s anything, any problems or anything you want to talk about,” and Cedric nods halfheartedly as he turns and begins walking for the door.

  “Don’t forget how much you’ve accomplished already, by making it to Brown,” Tom says, keeping his voice even but betraying some urgency.

  Cedric turns, expressionless. “It’s a little hard to remember all that now.” He seems to force a smile of gratitude as he strays out the door. And Tom James spends what’s left of the day replaying the dialogue in his head, wondering what else—what better—he might have said.

  11

  BACK HOME

  A sheet of ice blankets Washington. Cedric sits on a dinette chair in striped pajamas, leaning close to a radio on Barbara’s kitchen counter.

  “Montgomery County public schools, closed; District of Columbia public schools, two hours late; Alexandria public schools, closed … ”

  He flips it off and dials a familiar number. “Hi, it’s me, Cedric Jennings,” he says expectantly to a secretary answering the phone at Ballou’s office. “I was wondering if ‘Alumni Day’ is still on? It’s supposed to start at 9:30 but with the two-hour delay, school won’t even be starting until 10:45 … uh-huh … okay, then. I’ll be there, for sure … yeah, ’bye.”