by Ron Suskind
Mr. Taylor clams up. So much for that race metaphor, Cedric thinks to himself, delighted to employ an SAT word. He jumps up from the chair and paces around the classroom, picking up things and putting them down, looking caged.
“So, did you mail the application yet?” Taylor asks, trying to keep the conversation alive.
“Yeeeess, I maaaiiiled it,” Cedric says, rolling his eyes.
This is not just any application. It’s a bid for acceptance into a special summer program for top minority high school students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s highly competitive, drawing from a nationwide pool and taking kids for an intensive six-week program between their junior and senior years. It offers academic enrichment but also sizes up whether the students could cut it at MIT. About 60 percent are eventually offered a blessed spot in the university’s freshman class for the following year.
Cedric does not dare speak about it to anyone except Mr. Taylor, who helped him with the application. He feels too vulnerable. His yearning is white hot. It’s his first real competition against invisible opponents—minority kids from far better schools—in what Cedric rightly knows is a dry run for the college applications that must be mailed in the coming school year. It could even mean a slot, eventually, at MIT.
It will be nearly two months before he hears whether he’s accepted, but the program is quickly consuming Cedric’s thoughts. His notebooks in math, physics, and English have MIT doodles—the three magic letters are Gothic here, three-dimensional there, then crossing over one page and written fifty times on the next. Being accepted there would be the reward for years of sacrifice.
“You think I’ll get in?” he asks, awkward and momentarily exposed, but catches himself. “I mean, you know, whaaaatever. What does it matter?”
“Will you get in?” begins Mr. Taylor, launching another discursive riff. “Well, let me note … ” The class bell rings, interrupting him, and Cedric prepares to go, having lost his taste for an answer.
The hallways fill as a wave of students from the gymnasium washes through the school. Leaving the chemistry classroom, Cedric keeps his eyes fixed forward on a shifting spot of linoleum about a yard ahead of his front foot. He hears someone from behind, a boy’s voice, yell, “Where was you Cedric—hiding in the bathroom?” followed by a burst of nearby giggles, but he won’t look up. Just don’t get into it, he says over and over in his head, trying to drown out the noise.
Today, though, it’s no use. He wheels around to see a contingent behind him, two hard-looking boys he barely knows and an accompaniment of girls.
“Why don’t you just shut up,” he barks, facing them while backpedaling. “Just leave me alone.” Fortunately, his math class is the next doorway and he slips into the almost empty classroom, relieved to have avoided an altercation.
“Ready for the test today, Cedric?” asks Joanne Nelson from her desk across the room. She’s a round, soft-spoken, dark-skinned black woman who also had Cedric in tenth grade.
“Uh-huh,” he nods, regaining some composure. “Yeah, I mean, I think I’m in real good shape.”
The test is in Unified Math, his favorite subject. Each day, Cedric looks forward to this class, composed of eighteen kids from Ballou’s special math and science program.
With the program, Ballou is attempting a sort of academic triage that is in vogue at tough urban schools across the country. The idea: save as many kids as you can by separating out top students early and putting the lion’s share of resources into boosting as many of them as possible to college. Forget about the rest. The few kids who can manage to learn, to the right; the overwhelming majority who are going nowhere, flow left.
Cedric, like some other math/science students, applied to the program and arrived a year early to Ballou, which allows a handful of ninth graders to enroll with the eight-hundred-student tenth grade class. While at Ballou, the math/science students mix with the general student body for subjects like English and history but stay separated for math and science classes, which are called “advanced” but are more at a middle level of classes taught at most of the area’s suburban high schools.
Slipping into a favorite desk, Cedric watches as the rest of the class arrives, mostly girls, many of them part of a tiny middle-class enclave from nearby Bolling Air Force base. He is friendly with a few of the girls, but today the room is tense and hushed, so he just nods a quick hello or two. Soon, everyone is lost in the sheaves of test papers.
It takes only a few moments for a calm to come over him. Knowing the material cold is Cedric’s best antidote to the uncertainty that sometimes wells up inside him, the doubts about whether any amount of work will be enough to propel him to a new life. He takes out his ruler and confidently draws two vertical lines, noting points for asymptotes, limits, and intercepts. He moves easily through the algebraic functions on the next few questions, hunched close to his paper, writing quickly and neatly, the pencil’s eraser end wiggling near his ear. For half an hour, he is steady and deliberate, like someone savoring a fine meal.
When he arrives at the last question—which asks students to write about the topic they have found most interesting thus far in the semester—he starts tapping his pencil on the desk. So much to choose from.
Finally, he begins to write: “The part that most interested me was finding the identity of the trigonometric functions. I had a little bit of trouble with them at first, but they became easy!” He reels off ten lines of tangent, sine, and cosine functions, an intricate equation springing effortlessly from his memory, and arrives at a proof. Cedric sits back to admire his work. It’s so neat and final, so orderly. So much confusion, all around, such a long way to travel to get out of this hole, but here, at least, he can arrive at modest answers—small steps—that give him the sensation of motion.
He’s done and puts down his pencil. Still ten minutes to the period bell. Suddenly, he smiles for the first time in days and again grabs the dull No. 2. Across the bottom, he scribbles “I LOVE THIS STUFF!”
Each afternoon, there is a choice of bus stops. The stop right in front of the school is usually quiet and empty late in the afternoon, while another one, a few hundred yards away on bustling Martin Luther King Avenue, is always hopping.
At 5:02 P.M. on this day, a week after the awards assembly, Cedric Jennings emerges from Ballou’s side entrance, having already finished his homework and another SAT practice test in Clarence Taylor’s room. He slings his bookbag over his shoulder, freeing his hands to pull closed his three-year-old black parka with the broken zipper. Day by day, he’s hearing fewer barbs in the hallways about the awards assembly, and his spirits lift a bit as he sees a fading late afternoon sun shining across the teachers’ parking lot. He pauses to look at it a moment—there hasn’t been much sun lately—and decides today to opt for Martin Luther King.
In a moment, he’s strolling on the boulevard—Southeast’s main street of commerce, legal and otherwise—and taking in the sights. There’s a furious bustle at this time of day. Darkness, after all, comes earlier here than in those parts of Washington where the streetlights work, where national chains have stores with big neon marquees, and where everything stays open late. In those places, the churn of commerce isn’t halted, as it is here, by a thoroughly rational fear that seems to freeze the streets at nightfall.
Cedric huddles against the cloudy plastic window of the bus stop hut and watches the drug dealers near the intersection at 8 th Street. He wonders what draws him out to the avenue bus stop, where—God knows—he could get killed. People do, all the time; he muses today, as he often does when he stands at this stop, about whether coming out here means he’s going a little crazy.
Two crack dealers are chatting about twenty feet away. Both guys are in their early twenties, with hair mottled from being outside all day—one in a fine-looking long-sleeve Redskins football jersey and the other in a soft leather jacket. Cedric cranes his head around the hut’s aluminum edge to pick up the conversation. He’s s
ure they’re armed, and he spots telltale bulges on each with his trained eye.
“So, you see, this bitch, she sucked my dick just to get her a little rock,” says the Redskins jersey.
“Hey, next time you send her to me,” says the soft leather, throwing his head back in a toothless laugh. “I’ll give her what she needs real bad.”
Cedric listens, not breathing, and then pulls back behind the plastic wall just as the one in leather turns toward him.
Hidden behind the bus shelter, he replays the dialogue in his head, where he will continue to chew on it for days afterward. He smells the rich greasy aroma of Popeye’s Fried Chicken wafting from across the street, hears a saxophonist just up the boulevard, playing for quarters. A few guys he recognizes from Ballou, including some crew members, wander into view and he watches them flirt—or “kick some game”—with two cute girls who are rolling their eyes but definitely not walking away.
Spending so much time alone, he finds it hard to resist observing the fiery action all around. No diving in, not for him, not ever, but what’s the harm in watching a little, picking up bits of this or that? He spots the bus a few blocks down. Clenching his molars to flex muscle at the bend of his still smooth, boyish jaw, he steps out into the wind.
Apartment 307 on the third floor of the blond brick High View apartments at 1635 V Street, Southeast, is empty, dark, and warm at 6:04 P.M., when Cedric unlocks the door. There hasn’t always been heat, with overdue bills and whatnot, and he always appreciates the warmth, especially after the long walk from the Anacostia bus and subway station in the icy dusk wind.
He slips out of his coat and backpack and goes from room to room turning on lights, something he’s done since he was a small kid, coming home alone to apartments and tiptoeing, with a lump in his throat, to check if intruders were lurking inside closets and under beds.
It’s not a very big place—two bedrooms, a small bathroom, a kitchenette, and an attached living and dining room—but it’s one of the better apartments that he and his mother, Barbara, have lived in. He’s even got his own bedroom in the far back corner.
He flips on the switch. It’s like a bear’s winter cave of strewn matter—a thick padding of clothes, magazines, rubber-soled shoes, books, loose papers, and more clothes.
Cedric turns on his beloved Sony Trinitron, a 19-inch color TV that his mother rented for him in ninth grade from a nearby Rent-a-Center (just paid off a month ago at an astonishing total price of nearly $1,500) and flops onto the bed. Like his proclivity for spying on street hustlers, the TV is a vital element of Cedric’s secondhand life. He loves the tube, especially the racy, exhibitionist afternoon talk shows, which he watches for a few minutes tonight before turning to the local news—the lead story about a shooting not far from here—and then flipping to The Flintstones, a favorite.
He hears the thump of a door slamming.
“Lavar, you home?” comes the voice—calling him, as his mother always has, by his middle name—but he doesn’t get up, figuring she’ll wander back. In a moment, Barbara Jennings, hands on hips, is standing in the doorway.
In the sixteen and a half years since Cedric’s birth, Barbara Jennings has been on a path of sacrifice and piety that has taken her far from the light-hearted haughtiness of her earlier self—the woman with a blonde wig, leather miniskirt, white knee-high boots, and a taste for malt liquor. Cedric has seen pictures of that skinny young thing, a striking girl with a quick smile who, as he has discerned from his mother’s infrequent recollections, searched for love and found mostly trouble.
She stopped searching long ago. Barbara is a churchwoman now. On weekdays she works in a data input job at the Department of Agriculture, where she has been for almost eleven years, and splits the rest of her time between a church in a rough section of Washington north of the Capitol dome and this small, messy apartment.
Cedric looks her up and down and smiles thinly. Today, like most days, she has opted for a black dress and sensible shoes, an outfit most appropriate to her general mood, needs, and heavier frame. But her features—her smallish nose and pretty, wide-set eyes—have held up well, even at forty-seven and without makeup.
“I thought you would have made dinner by now,” she says, slipping a thin chain with her dangling Department of Agriculture photo ID from around her neck. “How long you been home?”
“Only a couple of minutes,” Cedric says, turning back to the tube. “What we got to eat?”
“I don’t know, whatever’s in there,” she says curtly before disappearing into her room to change out of her work clothes. Taking his cue, Cedric moves into the kitchen and begins breaking up ground beef into a frying pan. He pours in a can of navy beans, some oil, chopped onions, some pepper, salt, a little paprika, and other condiments. He does this without complaint or enthusiasm—it’s what he does most nights—and soon there are two heaping plates of steaming hash.
“Hey, it’s ready and all,” he calls around a short breakwall behind the stove to Barbara, who’s sitting in a bathrobe on the white living room couch watching TV.
Usually, he takes his plate to his room and she eats on the low, wide living room coffee table—each sitting in front of their own TV. Tonight, though, she clears away newspapers and unopened bills from the dining room table.
“I haven’t talked to you in ages, it seems,” she says softly as they sit down to eat.
“I’ve been around,” he says, grateful for her attentions. “Just been a lot going on—at school and whatever.”
So it ends up being a night that they talk. It happens every couple of weeks. It’s not needed more than that, Cedric figures. He knows that his mom wants to give him his space, now that he’s sixteen and, by his reckoning, almost grown up, so she doesn’t bother him in his room, where he spends most of his time. Maybe too much time, she tells him sometimes, but it’s the only place he feels he has any privacy. After all, it’s not as if he goes out late on weekend nights with friends, like most kids at school. Inside his room is the only place he can really relax.
He describes last week’s assembly, about his not going, and she shakes her head dismissively. “What did I tell you? Before you know it, you’ll be leaving them all behind. Just pay them no mind.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, “but what if I get rejected by MIT? That’d kill me.” Barbara heeds this more carefully. It was she, after all, who found a description of the program in a scholarship book that someone gave to her at the office.
“You can’t be worrying about MIT, Lavar. Just pray about it. If God has meant it to happen, it will.” She looks up between bites and sees he’s not convinced. “Look, your grades are perfect, your recommendations are good. What can they not like?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he concedes.
“What’s the point of getting down on yourself?” she says. “People will see that you’re special.”
He nods, letting her words sink in, and they eat for a while in silence—just the two of them, the way it has been for years. Barbara’s two older girls, Cedric’s half-sisters, are twenty-six and thirty-one and long gone, leaving mother and son to rely on each other in more ways than they can count.
Through years of ups and downs—times when he was certain that he was unworthy of success or love or any reasonable hope of getting something better—her faith in him has been his savior. It always amazes him. Having finished dinner quickly, he watches her clean her plate contentedly, and he shakes his head. She’s just rock solid certain that he’s going to MIT. Who knows, he wonders as he busses their plates and begins washing the dishes. Maybe she’s right.
Both return to their customary evening routines—Barbara back to the couch and her sitcoms while Cedric dries and puts away the dishes and silverware. Quieter now, with the sink water not running, he hears what sounds like pops from outside, almost certainly gunshots. He looks over at his mother sitting by the window but she doesn’t react, so he begins wiping down the kitchen counters.
Gunshots ar
e part of the background score here. Listen on most nights and a few pops are audible. The corner nearest the house—16th and V—is among the worst half-dozen or so spots in the city for crack cocaine dealing. The corner a block north—16th and U—is, of late, the very worst. There has been lots of shooting on both corners recently, but still they’re open all night, and the traffic of buyers on 16th remains strong and steady in all weather.
Cedric knows that the surrounding mayhem is not something he and his mother need to talk much about. Still, it’s always there, ionizing the air in the apartment, lending it some extra gravity, which, Cedric told his mother a couple of weeks ago, gives him “a little something to push against.”
Cedric hangs up the wet dish towel on a drawer handle and strides toward the short hallway leading to his room. He glances quickly at Barbara as he passes and realizes that the TV is on but she’s no longer watching it. Her eyes are on him.
He stops. “What you looking at?”
She pauses as though she’s trying to remember something. “What did I once tell you?” she asks finally, in a tentative voice.
“Ma, what are you talking about, talking crazy?”
“What did I once tell you, Lavar?”
“I don’t know. You tell me lots of things.”
She stands, tying her robe closed, and slowly points a finger at him, buying an extra moment to get the words from Scripture just so: “The race,” she says with a satisfied smile, “goes not to the swift nor the strong, but he who endureth until the end.”
Oh yes, that’s a good one, Cedric agrees, and nods. Hasn’t heard that one in a while. “Thank you, Jesus,” he says to her with a wry smile as he makes his way toward the back bedroom. Stopping at the threshold, he turns and calls back: “But it wouldn’t be so terrible to be all swift and strong—just once in a while—and let some other people do all the enduring.”
Barbara, sunk back into the couch, can’t help but laugh.
ATTENTION, STUDENTS. WE ARE IN CODE BLUE.”