by Ron Suskind
As she slides into a good seat by the window, she recalls something she didn’t do today: call her brother Butch. The house where she and her nine siblings were raised on 15th Street, Southeast, has been in abeyance during the two years since their father died, leaving no will, and Butch moved in. He’s been living there almost for free, and Barbara and her four sisters think they really should settle it—either have him buy out their shares or sell it outright. It could mean almost $7,000 apiece for them, money Barbara sure could use, money that could finally get her ahead for once.
The bus inches along in the rush hour traffic of Washington, and she fingers the cash in her pocket. As a church missionary, she’s supposed to give $20 tonight, and she desperately wants to. The pastor says that every dollar given will return tenfold. She puts the $10 in her purse and leaves the big bill in her pocket, where she can reach for it quickly.
Thinking of Butch brings her mind to the clapboard two-story on 15th Street where so much of her old life unfolded. The porch is the first thing she always thinks of, because that was always her refuge, the place to which she fled. Inside, the house was often an angry place. Her parents had moved to Washington from Plumbranch, South Carolina, when Barbara—the third oldest—was three. Seven more children followed. Her father, Maurice, was a construction worker by day and a janitor by night. Her mother, Janey Bell, worked an evening shift as a cook. Starting at nine years old, Barbara, a quiet, shy girl, mostly took care of the younger children. Other daughters were favorites of one parent or the other, and all the boys got off easy. Barbara worked, trying to win affection that never came, and then worked some more. Along the way, there were beatings. Both parents, overwrought with too little money and too many children, fiercely swung the belt—or anything they could grab. It would be decades before she got some distance from the violence. “They didn’t call it child abuse then,” she said years later to a friend.
By sixteen, she was searching for someone to take her away from it all, often dreaming of what might be as she stood on that porch, her back turned to the house. Plenty of someones came by, but none helped her escape. A decade later, she had two girls—Nanette, or Neddy, and Leslie—from brief relationships with two different men.
Those years took their toll, and she was a weary, pencil-thin bleached-blonde at twenty-eight when she rounded the corner of 15th Street one day in August 1975, after a long day of data input in her low-rung federal job. Though she’d recently found an apartment for the girls and herself, Barbara couldn’t shuck off the weight of her past. Still the dutiful daughter, she was stopping by to cook her father’s dinner and noticed a man on the porch chatting with her sister Chris. A moment later, when introductions were made, she learned his name was Cedric Gilliam. Barbara said she’d seen him around. With a wide, quick smile, he took the hands of Chris’s two-year-old son, Maurice, and walked him across the floorboards. “You staggering, just like your daddy. You didn’t know I know your daddy,” he said, as Chris giggled. When he passed the baby to Barbara, she noticed he was gentle with him.
“Any kids?” she asked.
“You kidding? I’m a free man,” he said. “Maybe someday, you know, I’ll settle down. But not yet.”
She found out a few things about him—just enough, she didn’t push. He had served time for bank robbery, was paroled last year, and had just finished his bachelor’s degree in business from D.C.’s Federal City College, part of a program for former convicts.
College? She tried not to show that she was impressed, but it was easy to see. He pointed down the street to a hunter green Chrysler Cordoba. “All that fine Corinthian leather,” he said, mimicking Ricardo Montalban in the famous ad, and Barbara chuckled. “That’s right,” he told her. “That car’s brand spanking new.”
“Okay, I might need a ride later,” Barbara said coyly, before slipping inside.
She in fact did need a ride that night to her new apartment, and soon Cedric Gilliam was a regular visitor. Over the coming year as they ran and partied together, she found out some things that should have made her cautious. There was more to his criminal past than she had at first thought, including a long string of bank robberies—serious, gun-in-the-face crimes—and the fact that he both dealt and used drugs. Most troubling, though, were some things he told her late one night about his father, Freddie. A truck driver, he mercilessly beat everyone in the Gilliam household, especially Cedric’s mother, before deserting the family when Cedric was seven. Lying next to him, watching him as he slept, Barbara thought about how that desertion might have left the type of wounds that never heal.
But she had become a woman with few choices. She was busy and so was he, and when they were together everything was easy.
Until one morning in the fall of 1976. She called him from work and said that he should come by that night, that there was something they had to discuss.
“Well, I’m pregnant,” she started as he settled into a kitchen chair across from her later that night. “And, the thing is, I really want to have this baby. I’ve wanted a boy, you see, and I think this could be it.”
“Could be a girl,” he replied evenly.
“I have this strong feeling, though, that it’s not,” she ventured, not sure if her hunch about the baby’s gender was just a desperate wish. Growing up, she’d envied her brothers’ easier lives and hoped to someday have a boy, too.
“You see,” Cedric said, “I don’t want no kids right now. Getting my degree and all, I’m getting my life on track.” Barbara knew there were other women, and she wondered if he’d already decided to have kids with one of them, but she wouldn’t press the point.
So around they swirled for hours—she, searching for emotions in him that she had long feared were absent, looking for something, anything, that might have bonded them together around the idea of a child; he, blunting her initiatives, seemingly telling her everything but the truth.
As dawn approached, after a lot of crying and screaming, she decided to drop her last card. She couldn’t go any lower.
“You know, I’ve had some abortions before we met and all,” she said, feeling her stomach tighten. “They say it ain’t good to have too many. I mean, if I have another, it could ruin me.”
He flinched, but he recovered quickly. “You already got two kids. Why you need more?” The words sounded godawful, and in a moment he was up, pounding around the living room, shaking his fists, ranting about how they “had it so good, everything going great, now this.”
“Look, it’s simple!” he hollered finally, his voice going shrill. “Either the baby or me. You have this baby, you won’t be seeing me again. Ever!”
A few hours later in the mid-morning, she went to an abortion clinic near Capitol Hill, trying her best to stick with her plan to focus on how she was doing this for him, for their relationship. But she left, unable to go through with it, and called Cedric, hoping for some sympathy. She got only fury, as he told her flat out: “Keep the child and we are over.”
After a few weeks of meandering reappraisals, she was back at the clinic. As a nurse with a clipboard asked if she’d had any abortions before, Barbara nodded and then said nothing for a moment. She began recalling all the broken promises, the years of betrayals from grinning, sweet-talking boys pretending to be men who had all by now run away.
“I’ve had enough,” she said firmly, coming to. “I’ll be going now.” She nodded a thank you to the nurse, got up, and walked out into the crisp, brilliant November day, feeling an unfamiliar sense of purpose.
At 6 A.M. on July 24 of the following year, 1977, she caught a ride to Columbia Women’s Hospital. After so much having gone wrong in her life, finally she was right about one thing. “Missus Jennings,” the obstetrician said. “It’s a boy.”
Shifting on the bus to make room for an old man in the seat beside her, Barbara smiles as she recalls the words: “It’s a boy,” her boy. As the bus picks up speed again, she notices the passing landscape for the first time in half an hour
, entering the Shaw neighborhood of D.C. Just a dozen blocks east of the lawyers and lobbyists on Connecticut Avenue and K Street, Shaw is a rutted, forgotten area of vacant lots, wandering prostitutes, and small, struggling shops tucked in the shadows of grimy row houses. She’s been coming here a few times a week for over sixteen years.
With little effort, she could calculate it to the day, she muses. Her son was three months old and she was depressed when a concerned friend dragged her to the Baltimore Armory to hear some middleweight preachers. They were Apostolic Pentecostals, fiery men who leapt and yelped and danced, whipping the crowd to a frenzy of faith. People were running down the aisles, speaking in tongues, and she got swept up in it. A hole in her heart seemed to fill, if not heal, and she wept and wailed along with the rest of them.
The star that night was a skinny, boyish preacher named C. L. Long, and a few days after first hearing his booming voice Barbara was standing in his church, ready to be baptized by the water and to receive the Word.
Just shy of thirty years old, she finally seemed to find some bearings—enough, at least, to make a few decisions to stick by. First, she’d always call her son by his middle name, Lavar; second, they would spend every minute they could in the sanctuary of Scripture Church, the refuge of Pastor Long.
After the bus takes its usual last turn and stops, Barbara rises and slips out the back door onto the street. Towering before her is Scripture Cathedral, a soaring, drywall barn built a few years ago where the dour, brick Scripture Church once stood. Pastor Long is now called Bishop Long, a leader in the fast-growing order of black Pentecostalists who’ve been steadily siphoning parishioners from mainstream urban churches.
The rain has stopped, and Barbara checks her watch. The service will be starting in ten minutes, so she walks briskly into the main entrance, passing under a hundred-foot wall of stained glass. She sits in the back for a moment. When she filters through memories as she did on today’s bus ride it reminds her how she’s invested everything in Lavar—all her hopes—giving their relationship a ferocious intensity, almost as volatile in some ways as the house she grew up in. She’s so bound to his success, it sometimes scares her.
People are already filing down the mauve aisles and into the pews. Barbara walks slowly toward her regular pew near the pulpit where the other missionary ladies are standing. It’s faith, all about faith, she decides. If she can just keep Lavar’s faith in God and in righteousness living intact for a little longer, blessings will come. Rewards will come. She knows they will.
The service crests forward in swells of fervor, then contemplation and then more fervor—all mixed in with traditional gospel standards. The rhythm is familiar and relaxes her. People come forward for blessings, and the crowd—about four hundred on this damp night—cheers for them and for themselves. She knows that Bishop Long will make a strong appeal for contributions (the church, as always, has pressing needs) and she settles back for the close of the service as he makes his plea.
“Let’s talk about when you give your last dollar to God,” shouts Long, now a heavyset man in his early fifties, with a wide, leonine head atop a cinder block body and the delicate ankles of a dancer. Smiling broadly, he eggs them on. “Then, and only then, will you know what faith is all about. Faith is taking the last $10 from your checking account and saying, ‘God, I give this to you, because I have nothing but faith, I live on faith, and I know in my heart that you’ll bring it back to me in ways too grand and too many for me to even imagine.’”
The missionary men, holding out wicker baskets on long wicker poles, begin their walk down the aisles. Barbara fingers the $20 in the pocket of her dark blue skirt. Numbers start running through her head: she’ll need money for the week’s commute; and whatever’s left they’ll need for food—a little, at least, for the four days until this Sunday’s chicken dinner at church. The baskets are moving, filling up sure and steady, only three rows away. She shakes her head in frustration and stamps a heel on the carpet. Can’t do it. She pulls her hand from her pocket, grabs her purse from the seat, hurriedly snatches out the $10, and drops it gently on the soft nest of bills.
A boy, if he’s lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid’s first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe.
By this reckoning, Cedric Lavar Jennings wasn’t so lucky. Despite Barbara’s best efforts, he was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and reactions leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities.
From the start, Cedric received a steady diet of uncertainty and upheaval. He and Barbara moved around a lot. There were too many stops to remember as they bounced from tiny, short-term rentals to pullout couches or bedrolls at one of Barbara’s sisters’ apartments. But at least they were together. Barbara’s third big decision (after vowing to call him Lavar and to frequent the church) was to quit her secretary’s job and go on welfare. Her son had just turned two. She had been made a junior missionary at the church, and being with her Lavar in these crucial years (“when,” as she’d often say, “a child either gets the love he needs or he doesn’t”) was part of a reordering of her priorities. They lived frugally. The girls were in school, and Barbara and Lavar took buses to thrift shops in low-rent strip malls. She’d buy him books there and sometimes clothing. She’d prowl through the racks while he played with the secondhand toys. She bought cards with colors and numbers and they’d sit while she flashed the cards and drilled him. They visited museums and the Anacostia library. Countless hours were spent at the church. There were plenty of women around—between Barbara’s sisters and Scripture’s missionary ladies—and young Lavar was the pride of a matriarchy.
This sheltered, early period, though, was bound to be short lived. Just after Cedric’s fifth birthday, Barbara knew she’d have to start building his defenses. He would start a full day of kindergarten in the fall, and she would go back to work. But before that, there were things Barbara wanted him to know.
They were living in Northeast on a busy python of traffic and noise, Benning Road, just over a dry cleaners. It was 1982, and cocaine dealers were discovering the potency of a new concoction they called rock (later, crack), and dealers were beginning to use small children to make deliveries.
One day in late August, after Cedric and Barbara trolled a few thrift stores, they began walking the streets on all sides of the apartment. Barbara spoke to Cedric in careful, measured words. “You’re gonna be a big kindergartner next week. And I got to be going back to get a job, when you’re at school. Now, walking back from school, I don’t want you to be talking to anyone, understand?”
He nodded, picking up on her seriousness. Then she squatted next to him, so their faces were side by side, and she pointed across the street. “See that man over there?” she said firmly. “He’s a drug dealer. He sometimes asks kids to do things. Don’t ever talk to him. He’s a friend of the devil.” Block by block, corner by corner they went, until she’d pointed out every drug dealer for five blocks in either direction. Later that night, she slowly explained the daily drill. After school, he would walk by himself to the apartment, double lock the door, and immediately call her—the number would be taped by the phone. And, along the way, he would talk to no one.
The first day of school arrived. She’d bought him an outfit specially for the day: blue slacks and a white shirt. She walked him over to Henry T. Blow Elementary, which was just behind their apartment.
“Here, I got something for you.”
She took from her purse a fake gold chain with a key on the end and put it around his neck.
“This, so you won’t lose it.”
“Ma,” he said, already conscious of his appearance, “can I wear it underneath?”
She nodded, and he slipped it inside the crew neck of his white shirt. Years later, he would recall that dangling key—the metal cold against his smooth chest—and think ruefully about how exhilarating it felt: a first, cool breeze of freedom.
By that afternoon, he was a little man, walking purposefully across the playground and around the block to the apartment, unlocking and then locking the door, calling his mother to say he was all right. She started a new job as a data input clerk at the Department of Agriculture, and soon Cedric knew the phone number by heart. It was a ritual he’d repeat almost every day—double locking the door of this apartment or that—for nearly a decade.
And one other thing changed. The birth certificate that was required to enroll him in school listed his full name. He might be Lavar at home and at church, but now he was Cedric Jennings at school. “Saydric … Seeeedric … Cedric,” he’d say over and over, sitting alone in the apartment after school, watching afternoon reruns of I Love Lucy or The Brady Bunch or All in the Family. The name felt odd, like a bad fit, and he’d often wonder why his mother chose it.
He was Barbara’s little partner, sticking close to the trinity of school, church, and the locked apartment, trying—with sterling behavior and glowing notes from his teachers—to keep her from worrying all the time. Once, when his half-sister Leslie was baby-sitting, she had taken Cedric with her to visit her boyfriend down the street. As Leslie dragged him home later, having lost track of time, she whined, “God, hurry up Lavar. Ma’ll be back soon.” Suddenly, they were caught by a frightening specter: a nearly maniacal Barbara, wild-eyed, switch in hand, who snatched Leslie in midstride and snapped the switch across her face. Terrified, Cedric began to scream. His mother’s continuous apprehension—and attacks, like that night, of genuine panic—left Cedric certain there was danger everywhere.