A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  Soon, he was at the University of Michigan, getting another master’s degree—this one in social work—with a plan to eventually use those classes and credits toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, a particularly strong suit at Michigan.

  Years before, as he prepared to leave Brown and met with Clarence Thomas, the Justice warned Cedric that he could never go home again but might not be accepted up ahead, that he could end up “caught between worlds.” He said that might leave Cedric angry and frustrated. Cedric said he wouldn’t end up that way.

  What he has managed, instead, is a sort of straddle, a foot in each world. At Michigan, Cedric didn’t live in progressive, tony Ann Arbor, where he thought the people were “snooty and pretentious,” but instead in Ypsilanti, a lower middle class, mostly black community about 20 minutes off campus. His apartment complex, called “Lake in the Woods,” was sometimes called “Lake in the Hood.” Cedric loved that. By day, he’d work the hallowed corridors of higher education. By night, he’d slip out of Ann Arbor, for that town’s opposite number. “It’s safe here,” he told me one night in a phone call, just before he received his master’s in social work in December 2003. “It’s just people’s impressions that say otherwise—people who only see what’s on the surface. This place feels like home to me. And that feels like what I need.”

  Most lives follow the well-trodden path of growth and maturation and decline. But where they proceed creates distinctions of endless variety. A society’s shared principles—like equal opportunity and justice, the value of each individual—are tested against these distinctions. What makes Cedric’s cross-border journey so bracing is precisely the gap between how lives unfold in two very different countries he has inhabited, both called America.

  Ballou High School does not keep reliable records about its graduates. Of the class of 1995, about two-thirds of those who made it to senior year graduated. A few dozen went to college, many of them to junior or community colleges, or the University of the District of Columbia, or UDC, which accepts any graduate of a D.C. high school.

  Some students in the class also ended up in various realms of “the system”—the catchall term for incarceration, probation, parole, or police custody. Delante Coleman, who ran the Trenton Park Crew, was arrested several times over the coming years—in 1999, for possession of marijuana and PCP, and carrying a handgun; and in 2002, for assault during a fight with the mother of his child—but never convicted. James and Jack Davis, after various scrapes with the law, were arrested in 2003, charged with multiple counts of drug conspiracy, and placed in the D.C. Jail. James—who mounted a vigorous legal defense—was acquitted in May of 2004; Jack was convicted in November of drug conspiracy and a gun violation. He’s awaiting sentencing.

  The outcomes for most graduates of Ballou is more pedestrian. They ended up in the bottom rungs of the economy—the lower middle class, working poor, the underemployed. With the education they were able to get in high school, the options are limited. Their fortunes are more in line with LaTisha Williams, who, as of two years ago, was working as a waitress at a Fridays Restaurant in Washington. She had lost weight and was no longer selling M&Ms on the street for a storefront fundamentalist church, the point at which she was last noted in the book’s narrative.

  Next to Cedric, the character from Ballou who has drawn the most attention—and follow-up questions about his status—is Phillip Atkins. Phillip has come to represent that vast community of those left behind: a student who is as capable as Cedric, but makes life choices that are understandably guided by self-preservation on a dangerous terrain. He says, in essence, that his posture as a tough clown, and his nickname of “blunt”—slang for a marijuana cigar—are the sane responses to his environment. At graduation, the loudest applause was for Phil, though the codes of conduct at Ballou meant he had to trade a great deal for his popularity.

  But, as this book shows, Phillip—a Jehovah’s Witness—emerged from a family with a particularly fierce work ethic. The Monday after Friday’s graduation, Phillip began working in the mailroom at United Communications Group, a newsletter and data analysis company in Bethesda, Maryland. UCG’s owners had launched a “dreamers” program several years before: 62 kids randomly selected from the sixth-grade class at Johnson Junior High would receive full college tuition and costs if they made it post—secondary education. Phillip was one of those sixth graders.

  When I visited the company in late 2004, Bruce Levinson, one of UCG’s owners, told me that, thirteen years hence, seven of the 62 made it through some form of college—five of them girls.

  But Phillip, he said, was “doing better than almost any kid in the entire group—he’s a great guy, a real success.”

  Then we rode the elevator to Phil’s floor.

  I hadn’t seen him in eight years. Where he was once light-footed, with a dancer’s body, he’s now more of a halfback, a thick-shouldered, twenty-eight-year-old man with glasses. But the smile is the same, and the laugh. He’s been at the company almost eleven years, the first five in the mailroom.

  When last we spoke, about two years after Ballou’s graduation, Phillip said that “we busted on Cedric for the choices he made, but now some of us wish we’d made some of the same choices he did.”

  But Phillip was never one to fret over “what ifs”—and, over the years, he’s gone about the business of becoming a grown-up with clear-eyed ardor. A few years ago, before he was due to be married, he said he “wanted more out of life than being in the mailroom … I was about to be a husband, I knew I needed to step up.” During his years delivering the mail, his buoyant personality made him friends throughout the thousand-employee company. One of them tipped him off about an administrative opening in a division that collects and distributes telecom pricing data to clients. Phillip applied, and got the nod, but first had to master an intensive six-month course in working the company’s complex computer systems. It was pure, hard brain work—one of the first instances where Phil had to apply himself in this way—but he managed it. Now, six years later, he is firmly in middle management—helping to operate this business line, selling telecom data, and starting to move into sales.

  As we sat at his desk, piled with account data, Phil talked about his father’s “aim low” philosophy, discouraging his talented sons from thinking about college, or creative careers, in favor of solid, reliable work that pays the bills. “It was hard to swallow back then, but it taught us that work itself was something that was good and valuable. And he didn’t give us choice. You dream on your own time.”

  In high school, Phillip talked often of being a stand-up comic, “but I don’t think about that stuff, being an entertainer, anymore, like I used to,” he says. “Back then, I didn’t know what this would be like, having some security, working in a place where people know you and like you, where you’re appreciated for who you are. It’s not bad, not bad at all.”

  I ask what one piece of life advice he would give the eleventh-grade class at Ballou, if they were sitting with us in the office. He’s heard the school has slipped, even from his days there.

  “By the time they’re in eleventh, I’m not sure there’s much I could tell them that would make much difference,” he says after a bit. “How they were raised, that’s how they’ll be. Look, that’s how I am. I was raised to work. And I’m a worker.”

  I returned recently to Ballou High School. It was the last day before Christmas vacation, and the hallways were abuzz with expectation. Students would be released at noon—and released is the operative term. Enrollment is down about 20 percent from the era when Cedric, Phillip Atkins, the Davis twins, and Delante Coleman roamed these halls. Since the mid-1990s, the school has sunk from the worst in the District to a new low standard of mayhem.

  There are now more armed security guards—as many as twenty-eight at a time—and uniformed police officers. The principals turn over almost every year. Whole parts of the building have been closed down, including the science wing where Cedric lived for so many
afternoons.

  The latest trend in crowd control is instant suspension. Kids are caught in regular sweeps of the building. An average of thirty-seven are suspended per period—and the school day has been refashioned into five, ninety-minute classes (too long for even some college professors to ably fill) to keep students in controlled settings.

  Of course, there are bright spots—always a few. The handful of kids who manage to study through it all—mostly girls—and, in this last year, the marching band. They raised money to attend the nation’s high school band competition in California, and came in second in the entire country (they were marked down for not having uniforms, which they can’t afford). Now, as 2004 ends, there’s a new crisis. They’ve been asked to play for the Inauguration, but they’ll freeze in their homemade uniform of jeans and a Ballou T-shirt.

  But these are exceptions. The defining force in the building is, ever more, fear. Dozens of Ballou students have been killed in the past few years. This year, the star halfback on the football team was gunned down near the cafeteria. The shooter was another Ballou student, a fourteen-year-old who was eventually stopped by police for driving without his seatbelt buckled. In the car, they found a MAC-10 automatic assault rifle. When I talked to a vice principal about this—an old friend—he looked at me ruefully and told me of a market down the street where I could go buy one.

  Meanwhile, in a neighboring country, the kids from Brown’s unit 15, East Andrews, stay reasonably close and connected as they race across the sunlit uplands of opportunity. Zayd is married to the kind of bright, beautiful “kick ass” girl his mother hoped for. He’s written several plays, had them produced, and is now on the faculty of the English Department at Columbia University. Rob Burton, Cedric’s roommate, graduated from Brown with a degree in marine biology and now teaches environmental science to kids in South America. Chiniqua graduated from Brown after five years, went to graduate school in public health, and is now a hospital administrator in Boston. John Frank, after working in various businesses, is at Harvard Business School. Evan Horowitz has just completed his Ph.D. in English from Princeton. Phillip Arden is managing the family’s money out of Geneva. The list goes on. It’s all of a type: success in America’s professional class.

  And, on a sunny morning in December, Cedric is getting ready to testify in D.C. Family Court in the custody trial of an eight-year-old girl—one of his “kids.”

  He’s visited the little girl’s birth mother, who has had problems with drugs, and her foster mom, who now wants to formally adopt the child. He’ll describe both households in some detail, and offer judgments about the well-being of the child.

  We stand in an airlock of double doors, just the two of us, as he waits to be summoned to the witness stand. There’s some sort of procedural delay. The closed doors formed a quiet chamber in the bustling courthouse. And, as the minutes pass, he thinks that his mom once came to this building to plead her case in debtor’s court, just down the hall. “I suppose I have empathy enough to listen,” he says, “because I feel like I know these women, so many women, who come here looking for some justice in their lives. This is not a place they usually find it, and I know that. So, I whisper a prayer for them all. You see, I know that sometimes the innocent don’t get what they need, the guilty get a free pass, and some wounds can’t be healed, at least not quickly, and not here.”

  But they do often heal, with time’s passage. A few months before, in the late summer, Cedric was visiting his grandmother, Maggie Brisbane. This was a regular visit—he’d visited often since he’d graduated from Michigan and returned in January to D.C.—and Cedric offered his usual perfunctory greetings to the man on the couch: his father. Cedric Gilliam had been living with his mother, Maggie, for much of the past eight years since he was placed on probation. As she aged into her late 70s, he was there to be her support. She had always defended him, to Barbara and others, as a good man in a bad circumstance, and caring for her, or just being her companion—as is so often the way with oldest sons and single mothers—was a way he could repay that faith. He was cutting hair and working as a drug counselor, trying to stay clean himself. And, as he aged into his mid-fifties, and Cedric grew into manhood, their relationship—while never fully mended—lost some of its explosive charge. At least they’d stopped arguing.

  As Cedric left Maggie in the kitchen and strode for the door, his father beckoned him toward the couch. They just sat for a moment, these two men named Cedric, a father and his only child. “I’m sorry about the past,” Cedric Gilliam said. “I’d like to work at building a relationship for the future.” And that was that—an apology, and a statement of intent. Simple, heartfelt words, boiled to their essentials. “That’s fine,” Cedric replied, after a moment. “I’ve already forgiven you for everything a long time ago. You just have to respect that I’m older. Now, it’s man to man.” And then all that was left was repose and small talk.

  A few weeks later—in June—Cedric Gilliam was picked up for failing his urine test. He’d failed a few others over the preceding year. This was a last strike, a violation of his probation. The federal correctional facility at Lorton, Virginia, where he’d spent much of his adult life, closed in the late 1990s; prisoners from the District are now shipped to federal facilities around the country. Cedric Gilliam went to a minimum-security facility in Riverside, North Carolina, six hours away. With good behavior, he’ll be out by the summer of 2005.

  So life bumps forward for this American family. Cedric has been living for the past ten months at Neddie’s house, a neat three-bedroom cottage in the Maryland suburbs—but has started looking for his own place. He regularly sees Nicole Brown, an insurance executive now living in D.C., but says it’s not romantic, “just best friends,” and he keeps in touch with Chiniqua, Zayd, and the rest. Shortly before the book was published, I told Cedric and Barbara that I’d split any royalties with them—half for their family, half for mine—and, in the past few years, paperback sales have produced a few checks for all. Not enough to make anyone comfortable, but it has helped a bit with Barbara’s old bills and Cedric’s student loans. We see each other regularly and, last spring, Cedric attended the bar mitzvah of my youngest son, Owen. There he met Paul O’Neill, the main character of my latest book, The Price of Loyalty. They knew each other through their respective books, and were soon talking excitedly. When I approached, feeling an odd discomfort, they descended on me. “Paul and I decided we’re going to get together,” Cedric chortled, “and write a book about you!”

  As always, Barbara and Cedric are regular attendees at Scripture Cathedral, which continues to be led by Bishop Long, as robust and wild-eyed as ever. But now Cedric is the church’s youth minister, an important role, and a taxing one, with a hundred or so kids to guide through weekend bible study, plays, rehearsals, and assorted activities.

  In one small, but important, recalibration of long-standing church policy, Cedric and another young man recently organized a college night at Scripture—a first. They talked matter-of-factly about the challenges and rewards of college, the presumption being that going to college was an indisputably good idea. Parents and their mostly teen-aged children came. Attendance was reported to be very strong.

  All of which left one young man, still searching for the elusive unseen—a place, he now says, “where I won’t live in two worlds, but one”—feeling a surge of very reasonable faith.

  A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN. Copyright © 1998 by Ron Suskind. Epilogue copyright © 2005 by Ron Suskind. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

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The Library of Congress catalogued the original hardcover

  as follows:

  Suskind, Ron.

  A hope in the unseen : an American odyssey from the inner city

  to the Ivy League / Ron Suskind.

  p. cm.

  1. Jennings, Cedric Lavar—Childhood and youth. 2. Jennings,

  Cedric Lavar—Knowledge and learning. 3. Afro-American teenage

  boys—Education—Washington (D.C.) 4. Frank W.

  Ballou Senior High School (Washington, D.C.)—Students—

  Biography. 5. Brown University—Students—

  Biography. 6. Afro-American college students—

  Biography. I. Title.

  LC2803.W3S87 1998

  371.8’092—dc21

  [B] 97-52700

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76308-2

  v3.0