A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  At lunch after Friday calculus, Cedric picks at his macaroni and cheese with one hand and, with the other, a pile of 3-by-5-inch squares of colored paper: little, shove-in-your-pocket fliers that campus groups make to advertise events. Today the table is blanketed, making for good lunchtime reading.

  The gays and lesbians are staging a weekend of parties, culminating in the “Vote Queer, Eat Dinner” fete on Sunday evening, called a town meeting, for “TNT, LGBTA, BITE, QUEST, Hi-T with Q, SORT, B’GLALA, RUQUS, and all other queer folks” to party and elect officers.

  The Students of Caribbean Ancestry call one and all to their SOCA Cookup ’96, because, a pink flier boasts, “Dis Food Nice!” while a nearby yellow flier shouts: “Celebrate Latino History Month with this Semester’s LAST SPANISH HOUSE FIESTA!!! … Salsa! Merengue! Cumbia! Free Sangria, Beer and NON-ALCS!”

  A white flier trumpets “A CAPPELLOOZA II,” an a cappella competition that Cedric knows lots of kids in the unit will be going to—Zayd’s roommate, John Frank, will be singing with the Brown Derbies. Under it, a pale yellow one about tonight’s Brown University Chamber Ensemble at Alumnae Hall. There are plenty more—bashes, Friday and Saturday, by fraternities and feminists and anyone else you can imagine—that Cedric glances at and dismisses as he rises with his tray.

  The multicultural miasma, with its fixation on group identity and loyalty and authenticity, still unsettles him, though not quite as much as when he arrived last fall. Back then, he saw it solely in centrifugal terms, as something designed to distill and separate rather than unite. Now he knows it’s more complicated. Walking back to the dorm, he thinks again of his date with Chiniqua, of them talking about Keith Sweat and laughing and reminiscing. There is an almost irresistible comfort to being with your own, being able to share what’s common and familiar, to be with someone who really understands. Through high school, he spent so much energy trying to get away from people like him, and now he sometimes feels the opposite urge, the urge to finds others who are at least somewhat like him, which is really all the gays or the Latinos or the Asians are seeking. This morning, Chiniqua mentioned a blowout party tomorrow night at Harambee and Cedric considers, as he has ten times today, whether to go. He calls forth, also for the tenth time today, his one-line rebuttal: I didn’t come to Brown to be with only black people. I’ve already done that.

  Rob’s in the room, and they talk amiably, still a welcome change after the long months of strife. Rob says he’s staying in tonight—or at least has committed to—considering that he still “feels completely whipped” from “Funknight” at the Underground, Brown’s studentrun club. Cedric knows why Rob is mentioning the Underground. Last night, Cedric almost went with the regular Thursday night delegation from the unit. It was all very natural. Rob asked him to come along. Cedric said sure, and Rob nodded like it was no big deal, even though both of them knew it was. The Underground, especially on Thursdays, has been the unit’s most regular haunt. Cedric has been asked to go dozens of times. He’s always demurred and later heard stories of drunkenness and wild dancing. In one way or another, he’s let people know, starting around September, that it’s the last place someone who doesn’t drink and doesn’t dance (at least not in public) would want to be—precisely the sort of place, in fact, that Bishop Long and his mother have spent two decades warning him about.

  Such warnings ultimately made their last stand in the line that formed last night outside the door of the dark, noisy subterranean cave, a line in which Cedric was standing—the last of six kids from the hall—and then suddenly wasn’t.

  “You were there, right behind me,” Zeina Mobassaleh told him at breakfast this morning. “Then I turned around and you’d vanished.”

  The whole thing, already lore across the hall, was just plain embarrassing. Cedric, grateful Rob didn’t directly razz him about it, rises to get a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum from his desk and looks out the window, thinking it all through again and realizing how his stern, righteous solitude of last semester must have just looked like terror to everyone else, like someone afraid to join the world. Afraid, afraid of what?

  Rob sends off some scatological e-mail to a high school friend at the University of Massachusetts and, swiveling in his desk chair, rosy with delight from his missive, asks Cedric if he’s going to go to the “Sexual Assault and Spring Weekend” dorm outreach in a few days. “’Cause, you know, it could be pretty interesting, how, without even knowing it, you can get into a bad situation.”

  He’s just making conversation, but Cedric, desperate to shore up the miserable image of how he fled from the nightclub line, reaches for a cold bucket of rectitude, one of those discussion enders Barbara used to summon when dangerous issues arose.

  “I think it’s really simple with sex assault or whatever. It’s like AIDS. You have sex one time, you can get AIDS, so you just don’t do it. Same with sex assault: you don’t try having sex, you won’t have to worry about something like that happening.”

  Rob looks at him, clearly befuddled. “But, you can’t go through life not trying anything. What’s the point of that?” And Cedric, feeling suddenly transparent, folds with a glum, “Whatever.”

  His real response, for what it’s worth, comes later that night, when Molly Olsen (the fast-morphing, once-bald modern dancer) knocks on his door, asking him to come with her to the Underground to see some local comedians. He shrugs. He’s got nothing better to do, he says. It ends up being a cinch this time to just stroll in, so much easier than last night when he could feel all those kids from the unit wondering if he’d pull it off. He sits down at a table with her and his tall glass of ginger ale, dead center in a room filled mostly with white kids drinking watery beer, and waits for some expected discomfort to fade. Or rather, to arrive. After a few minutes and a second ginger ale, though, he realizes that nothing untoward is bound to happen, that, instead, he feels loose and sort of relaxed here with the always provocative Molly. And, soon enough, he’s laughing at the comedians with everyone else, having completely forgotten to consider how he must look.

  Just after noon on Saturday, Cedric rolls into a column of sunlight that has crept onto his pillow and stirs awake. Lying in bed, barely conscious, he tries to remember the swift-flowing sensations from the night before. After a few minutes, he settles on a hazy recollection of himself, sitting in the smoky nightclub, feet cleaving to the beer-sticky floor, head back, mouth foolishly open in a hoot, drunk coeds all around.

  He snaps upright, trying to shake the image away. After a moment, he’s surprised to find his thoughts racing backward to an in-class writing assignment on his first day of school last fall—a first-person autobiography in Wheelock’s class. He started it: “Who is Cedric? I am a very ambitious and very religious person … ,” but, sitting here, it seems to have been written with someone else’s hand, someone he barely knows. Looking down at the hands resting on his thighs, he raises his palms to cover his eyes. “Who is Cedric?” he murmurs. “Who is Cedric?”

  An hour later, he’s walking briskly down an extension of Thayer Street, where the fashionable shops give way to low-rent housing, and then cuts left toward a working-class section of town. He needs to get away from the university, to clear his head, to get his bearings.

  He has ventured a few times before to this part of Providence, just beyond Helaine’s office and the Georgian brick homes of professors: fifteen or so square blocks of turn-of-the-century row houses and squat apartments, broken by clusters of sole proprietorships, jewelers, drugstores, and barbers, in buildings charging modest rent. It’s urban and threadbare and a little grimy. And, as he walks, he feels solemn but grounded, a little like he used to feel strolling Martin Luther King Avenue in Washington.

  Just past a fenced park where some homeless men are splayed on wrought-iron chairs, is a boxy brick building, the Salvation Army’s local headquarters. Cedric ducks into the store, lingering at the trash can full of scratched snow skis, then the one with tennis rackets, before losing him
self in aisles of men’s overcoats and plaid sport jackets, picking through them expertly. Eventually he emerges onto the street in a beige wool overcoat with a high, turned-up collar (a real ’70s Superfly number, he thinks, for only $15) and struts eastward toward a few shops clustered around a pizza joint with some outdoor tables. The sun, spotty until now, breaks clear, so he buys a ginger ale and sits in the empty row of tables. Turning left, he catches his reflection in the plate glass window. “My God, I look like my father,” he murmurs. The resemblance is unmistakable—especially in the coat—to the way Gilliam used to look, all slender and stylish, when Cedric was a kid.

  The visage is both alluring and unnerving, but he indulges it, thinking of what Gilliam might be looking like these days (back at Lorton after a good long drink of freedom) and how difficult it will be to find solid work when he gets out, whenever that will be. He’ll have to start a business or something, Cedric decides, because who would hire him? “I wouldn’t,” he mumbles to himself, and laughs hoarsely. He abandoned me at the start and then did it again and again, Cedric reflects, trying, with little success, to muster his customary rage on the subject. He wonders, instead, if his father is still doing drugs (Barbara once said there are plenty of drugs in jail) and whether the drugs make him sick.

  He slips off the coat, flings it over the empty chair across from him, and roots around in his pants pocket. On a slip of paper he retrieves is scribbled 1-800-USA-FIND, an organization he saw on one of the shows (Sally or Montel, one of them). You send the organization $80 and they try to find a certain person you’re looking for. When he jotted it down off the TV, he was thinking of Jamal McCall, his elementary school friend, his first real buddy, who left suddenly after a week at Jefferson. The whole matter is vexing. Here it is, his best month, a time when he’s emerging and finally figuring some things out, and here he’s thinking about going back to find Jamal. How bizarre, he thinks. But, looking at the number, he recalls again going to the porch on U Street, where Jamal lived, and cupping his hands on the cloudy window as he looked in at the vacant rooms. No word, no forwarding address, no good-bye. He shoves the paper back in his pocket, grabs the overcoat, and begins a meandering walk, here and there, stretching for hours. Just walking, trying to keep his bearings through unfamiliar streets, feeling edgy and contemplative and a little wild. At a mom and pop jeweler, he tries on some white gold rings he can’t afford (a nice complement, though, to the pimp coat) and then, at a nearby corner, approaches a man idling at a red light in his cream Infiniti Q30.

  “I love that car, how much does it cost?” Cedric asks, approaching the open driver’s side window.

  “Umm, about $55,000,” sputters the man, a distinguished, white fiftyish guy with salt-and-pepper hair who then steps on it, as though he’s worried Cedric’s next request will be for the keys. Cedric just watches the rounded back end speed away.

  “Wow,” he murmurs, “got to have one of those someday.”

  As the afternoon wanes, he circles in a wide arc back toward campus. Reviewing his curious, searching day, he wonders about why he needed to get away on his own and reminisce. After a bit, a line pops into his head that he first heard in high school during one of the many black history months and then had to write an essay about at MIT. Hell, thinking back, he’s probably used this quote in a half-dozen papers. It’s one of those classics from W.E.B. DuBois, the black philosopher and critic, the one about the black man having no “true self-consciousness” but rather a “double-consciousness,” which DuBois says is a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

  He chews on this for a while, turning it over in his head, and finds himself agreeing with the basic idea of blacks having a “double consciousness” but wondering if seeing yourself “through the eyes of others,” which everyone, after all, does to some degree, means you can’t also have a “true self-consciousness.” He feels like he’s getting one of those—a truer, clearer sense of himself—as he finally pushes forward out of his solitude and mistrust, through his thicket of fears and doubts. Part of that process, he figures, must include days like today, where he’s forced to backtrack through a thrift shop of memories where, no doubt, some demons are hiding in the racks. Who knows, he mulls, maybe to slay those demons is the reason he has to keep going back.

  He’s getting close to Brown, only six or seven blocks ahead, and up to the left is the Eastside Market, an old, modestly priced independent supermarket, a rarity, that he’s visited a few times to buy food.

  Finals will start in a couple of weeks and he figures it’s a good time to load up on provisions, cheap and bulky fare for when he gets hungry, studying late—something to sustain him in a pinch. Walking across the parking lot, he suddenly laughs loud, causing a passing lady to stare. What he really needs: Oodles of Noodles. A couple of packages. The dreaded Oodles (a staple to stave off starvation in the lean days of his youth, a dish he swore he’d never, ever buy when he grew up) are what he feels a sudden craving for. He may even down a bowl when he gets back to the dorm. Just thinking about it reminds him of one last thing he’s worked hard not to think about lately, and he silently commits to calling his mother, whom he hasn’t talked to since spring break.

  Dinnertime is approaching, and East Andrews is bustling, everyone revving up for Saturday night. Cedric, striding through with his bag of groceries, feels curiously renewed from his journey, ready now for almost anything. Balancing the groceries on his knee, the coat on his arm, he grabs the pen dangling from Chiniqua’s memo pad and writes, “Hey, what time’s that party at Harambee tonight? Call me. Cedric.”

  The groceries are barely unpacked onto his closet shelves when the phone rings.

  “Hello.”

  “Cedric? It’s me, Clarence. I’m in Providence.”

  “Mr. Taylor?! What are you doing here?”

  “I stopped through on my way to the marathon, you know in Boston. I’m so happy I got you.”

  They make a plan to meet, and Cedric hangs up, thoroughly astonished. What a day, past and present colliding, and now Clarence Taylor! Fifteen minutes later, on the far side of Brown’s main green, he spots a white Cutlass Ciera and breaks into a trot.

  “Cedric Jennings, as I live and breathe,” the teacher shouts.

  “Oh Gawwd. Mr. Taylor. I can’t believe you’re here,” Cedric says, panting, and they hug, the student now towering over his old teacher.

  “My oh my, you’re really growing up, look at you,” exults Mr. Taylor. Cedric has never seen Clarence in this context—sloppily casual in his hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, and sandals with no socks, far from home and with his wife, who nods politely from the far side of the car.

  After Clarence grills him a bit on academics and Cedric talks a little about his searching day, Clarence opens the car door. “I got something for you.” He reaches into the back seat, behind the Styrofoam Gatorade cooler and a bag of pretzels and pulls out a Bible study magazine. “Here, I brought this.”

  Cedric looks at it blankly and says earnestly, “I’ll read it as soon as I get back.”

  Clarence looks over at his wife and tells Cedric, “We’re going to have to get going soon,” but his visit wouldn’t be complete without a recitation. He’s been saving this one up.

  Cedric smiles benignly as Clarence plunges into Romans, chapter 8, verse 35: “Whoooooo,” he intones, “shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’” He pauses for dramatic effect, preparing the punchline. “‘Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.’”

  Nodding along with each verse, Cedric knows Mr. Taylor wants him to say something, something profound and scriptural. “Well, Mr. Taylor, you certainly got every word of that one from Romans rig
ht,” Cedric says, mostly to fill the silence. “But, you know, I think I like it better when you get a few words wrong, like you used to.” Clarence’s expectant smile fades a bit, and Cedric says the thing that just dawned on him. “Remember when we were in your classroom that time, me and LaTisha, and she was busting me about putting all my faith in making it to the Ivy League, to a place I’d never seen, where I might not be welcomed? And you said that thing, remember? About faith, you know, how the substance of faith is a hope in the unseen. You botched it and all, but in a good way,” he says as Clarence squints, trying to bring the memory into focus. But Cedric pushes forward—there’s almost no one else he can tell this to. “Well, thing is, I always imagined the unseen as a place, a place I couldn’t yet see, up ahead, where I’d be welcomed and accepted, just for who I am. And I still feel like it is a place, an imagined place, really, either here or somewhere else, that I’ll get to someday. But first, you know, now I realize that there’s work I need to do, too. I need to know—to really know—who I am, and accept who I am, deal with some of my own issues. That’s got to come first, before I can expect other people to accept me. The good thing, though, is that it seems like I’m just now coming into focus to myself—you know, beginning to see myself more clearly.”

  Clarence looks at him tenderly, wanting, it seems, to second Cedric’s insight. “The unseen may be a place in your heart,” he says cheerily. “Well, God bless.” They hug again, promise to write, and soon the Cutlass is on its way to Boston and Cedric is strolling buoyantly back toward the dorm. He discards the Bible magazine on a stoop on Brown’s main green—maybe someone else needs it—and looks up, thinking he smells a coming rain.

  The party at Harambee House is just getting under way at 10:15 when they arrive: Cedric, Chiniqua, and her black girlfriends from nearby hallways, Julia and Jodie, whom Cedric has gotten to know a bit. Cedric’s outfit is distinctive—gray sweat pants, black Nikes, a plain white T-shirt peeking from under his beige coat, collar up, topped with a leather cap he bought with his mom on parents weekend. With the coat and hat, his ’70s look is wildly inappropriate, as Julia told him it would be. Having finally gotten him to Harambee, Chiniqua, meanwhile, wants to make the most of it, poking at him playfully on the walk over about how there won’t be anywhere in the party room to sit and how he’ll just have to stand against the wall, like a statue, if he doesn’t want to dance like everyone else. She knows he doesn’t dance, at least not in public, and it would be a stunning added triumph if she could get him onto the floor.