by Ron Suskind
Phillip, lying on his bed, half listens. He’s heard this line of preaching before, his father’s “shoot low” philosophy. Life at the Atkins household, like that at the Jennings place, is dominated by faith, and their denomination is also growing wide and strong by pulling converts from more traditional mainstream urban churches. The denominations differ in tiny calibrations of literalism. Jehovah’s Witnesses, using the threat of excommunication, have long stood in opposition to a much longer list of worldly endeavors than the Pentecostals. Jehovah’s, the thinking goes, should have jobs, not careers. Following God’s will is the career, so attending college, in the view of many witnesses, is a selection of the temporal over the divine. “Set goals so they’re attainable, so you can get some security, I tell my kids,” Israel says to his friend as he rises and prepares to get into his red uniform for work. “Then keep focused on what success is all about: being close to God and appreciating life’s simpler virtues.” He pauses. “Like, take Phillip doing this tap dancing, for instance … ”
Phillip snaps up to lean against the cool plaster wall, his ear a few inches from the window frame. While Israel knows almost nothing of his son’s hip-hop life on weekend nights and in Ballou’s hallways, he recently found out about Phillip’s latest—and maybe last—stab at some form of achievement: tap dancing. For the past couple of months he has been sneaking off to a few after-school practices a week but not telling many of his friends, uncertain whether it fits with his carefully crafted demeanor. Sooner or later, though, his father was bound to find out. Phillip hears the conversation crest forward, with tap dancing mentioned in the same breath as a similar controversy—now ended—over his brother Israel’s sax playing. Israel was called one of the best sax players to ever come out of Ballou when he graduated last year. It seems like a long time ago; Israel barely touches his horn nowadays.
The very idea of a creative career rubs against their father’s sensible “shoot low, simple virtue” philosophy. “Tap dancing, like sax playing, won’t get anyone a steady job,” he says, lingering for a last moment in the sun as he rises from his chair. “Being an entertainer? God almighty. That’s getting on a path to being poor, desperate, and losing your soul!”
The friend laughs, and so does Israel—like it’s some kind of joke—and, inside, Phillip lies back again, pushing his face into the pillow.
One Friday afternoon at the beginning of April, Phillip slips into Ballou’s empty auditorium, where a small group of kids is waiting on the stage. Over the next hour, Phil reviews and rereviews a complex choreography, a dress rehearsal for the next day’s long-awaited show. He moves masterfully through a sequence of fifty-three different steps, slides, and spins. The dance teacher applauds zestily as he finishes, and Phil, a blush appearing on his light skin, indulges a bow.
The next day, a sunny Washington Saturday, the Kennedy Center auditorium comes alive with a wailing jazz number. Phillip and four other dancers spin and tap their way flawlessly through a complicated routine. The audience—about two hundred parents, brothers, and sisters of performers—applauds wildly.
After the show, in which three other ensembles also performed tap routines, all the kids slip through a stage door to an adjacent dressing area. Phil is practically airborne, laughing and strutting in his yellow “Ballou Soul Tappers” T-shirt. A few teachers from the school came, and one is carrying a video camera, taping the kids as they whoop and embrace in the afterglow.
“Hey, over here,” Phil yells, and the camera wheels around. “I’d like to thank a lot of people … this honor really belongs to them ….” He’s off into high gear, jumping voices—first an aw-shucks Elvis, then Eddie Murphy’s white guy accent, then a dead-on Richard Pryor nasal-speak, his body all twisting at the waist, hips out, a Pryor move. “And remember, all you kids out there,” he riffs in a voice now closing in on his own, “you are our future, you can be anything you want, you can go anywhere your heart leads you.”
The camera goes off. He hugs a girl from the troupe, and then a guy, and then isn’t sure where to go. He stands in the middle of the chaos of kids, all grabbing gym bags, changing shirts, flashing Polaroids and hugging some more. He just watches, not wanting it to end.
During the show he was craning to catch a glimpse of his parents. All that was visible on the other side of the footlights, though, were rows of silhouettes. His dad, always punctual, probably got his family here early, so they probably got something near the front. He wondered what the old man’s reaction would be. The songs included a few old jazz and blues numbers that his dad might recognize from what Israel calls his “confused, younger days,” when even he “had some trouble dealing with what was expected of me by God.”
The kids spill from the dressing area into one of the Kennedy Center’s Oz-like foyers—lit up by incredibly high, arched windows—where the parents patiently wait to rejoice.
Phil casually scans the thick, regal red carpeting.
“You seen my people?” he asks one of his fellow tappers.
“No, haven’t,” she says.
“Your people here?” he asks, tentatively.
“Sure, my mom’s over there,” the girl says, pointing.
His throat seems to catch. He shakes his head. He looks again across the crowd, now clustering into families and beginning to drift toward the elevators. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll find out where they are, why they couldn’t come.” He tries to force a smile, but, for the first time, he can’t seem to manage it. “I’ll find out later.”
Cedric Jennings, at sixteen and three-quarters, has decided that he’s been unnaturally focused and narrowly driven in the last couple of years, and definitely in the last couple of months.
And what better time to explore what’s natural and innate and waiting to emerge than in springtime, the season so suited to adolescence. Most kids his age have an impulse to try on new poses and voices to see what feels right, but for Cedric it comes as a modest awakening.
Not much about him has changed, outwardly. At the start of April, with no word still from MIT, he’s just spending a lot of time walking around with a glower, feeling particularly edgy and thinking a lot about how to alter people’s reaction to him—looking to “get to them” before they get to him.
He still stops by Mr. Taylor’s room after school but manages to keep the conversation away from heavy fare, mostly by talking about clothes or hip-hop music, stuff Mr. Taylor doesn’t know much about. Since the stairwell hug of two weeks ago, LaTisha has been a touch more amorous than usual, so he finds himself steering clear of her.
Cedric is on his way to the computer science classroom one morning in the first week of April. He’s not carrying any books. Left them in his locker. As he flows along with the between-periods crowd, he sizes himself up, his arms splayed a little out from his hips and not swinging much. He’s got a few inches on Phillip, whom he now feels ready for. If he really cut loose on Phillip, Cedric concludes, he could hurt him.
The period bell rings, and Cedric ducks into the bathroom. He doesn’t have to worry so much about the time. He has math this period, but he already did all the problems they’re working on, so Ms. Nelson said he could work on his independent study project in computer science. After finishing his business in the boys’ room, he lingers for a moment, looking in a long mirror over the sinks, narrowing his eyes to make his face look hard. He has put on a little weight lately. If his face fills out some more, he posits, he won’t be so bad looking, really.
A few minutes later, he saunters into the computer science classroom of Mr. Dorosti.
A class is under way, and Cedric strides purposefully between the row of desks closest to the door and the wall. He sits at a computer table in the back and flips on the Apple Macintosh. Near his head is a bulletin board with several sterling papers (one by Cedric, marked “100%, Excellent”) and an ancient, curling, three-by-five-inch photo of a Ballou student who went to Cornell nine years ago.
His independent study course with Mr.
Dorosti allows Cedric free access to the teacher’s upgraded desktop computer, even while classes are under way. Cedric views this as one of his few tangible perks. He’s conspicuous, yes, as he enters a class in progress, but at least he has a special status, he lives by different rules than the others.
Today, though, Dorosti happens to have other plans. “Cedric, listen, someone in this class needs to use the computer,” he says in broken English lacking sufficient nuance for Cedric’s tripwire sensitivities. “You’ll have to go.”
Cedric swiftly hits his boiling point. He doesn’t budge but stares a hole in the glowing screen. He hears a few sniggers in the room.
“Come on, let’s go now, Cedric,” Mr. Dorosti reiterates. “Not tomorrow.”
Cedric smacks off the power button and storms out. Crossing through the doorway, he blurts out, “Damn immigrant.”
Mr. Dorosti’s eyes widen, and the chase is on. Cedric, half running to keep a thirty-foot lead, ducks into an adjacent hall, then takes the stairs two at a time as a panting Mr. Dorosti shouts: “YOU’RE IN BIG TROUBLE NOW CEDRIC! YOU HEAR ME?!!”
Cedric spends the rest of the day feeling like a fugitive—not just from Mr. Dorosti but also from his own vaulted expectations for success that suddenly seem to be pursuing him as well.
He strides across hallways and into Mr. Taylor’s room. He tells the teacher that he isn’t going to enter the citywide science fair with his project. It would have been the centerpiece of a mentoring program—called Environmentors—with a black executive organized through the EPA. “That guy, the mentor, I’m not seeing him anymore, either,” he says to Mr. Taylor. “It’s over.”
Mr. Taylor is speechless as his star student practically runs for the door.
“I’m tired, I’m just getting out of here,” Cedric says as he disappears into the hallway, not bothering to look back or stop at his locker for his bookbag.
There’s an April shower outside, steady but not too heavy, and he passes by the bus stop nearest the school, bound for Martin Luther King Avenue. The rain actually feels kind of good—so what if he gets wet?—and he decides to walk a while, maybe all the way home, about two miles, or maybe somewhere else.
A few hours later, as dusk approaches, Scripture Cathedral stands like a giant glowing ark above the ruins. It is oddly shaped, with its front—a long, sloping wall of windows—jutting out like the prow of a ship.
It’s a towering presence. As Pentecostalism has grown in urban America, so has this church. After four years of ongoing renovations and expansions—just completed—it is truly a cathedral for Washington’s down and out, a cavernous place with a sixty-foot ceiling in the airplane hangar sanctuary, big enough to sit 1,500. A forty-foot-tall illuminated cross rises behind the wide, multileveled altar to watch over them.
With the Thursday night prayer meeting about to begin, Barbara searches nervously for Cedric, scanning the crowd of three hundred or so women in hats, men in bow ties, and a few polite, casually dressed children. Cedric’s lack of spirit has, in the last week or so, begun to worry her, so she made him promise that he’d come tonight. Her mind wanders as she slides into the pew, craning around every few seconds to glimpse toward the room’s entrance doorways in the rear. It seems like the whole month of March, since the bad incident over the dishes, Cedric has been something less than his prickly, headstrong self. He didn’t call her at work today like she thought he would. He’s never late. Should have been here by now.
The music swells to signal the start of evening services, and the choir comes in through a door in the back wall of the altar—a string of about twenty singers moving in a practiced, smooth procession to a rousing swirl of the gospel favorite “Jesus Is Everything to Me.”
The clapping and swaying is infectious. So many here have arrived from a bruising Thursday—staring at a computer screen or cleaning some school’s messy halls or hanging off the sidebar of a garbage truck. As they throw their heads back, shouting lyrics toward the far-off, recessed lighting, their release is palpable. It is deafening.
And then the room is hushed. Bishop Long rises from a cushioned chair at the center of the altar and moves to his pulpit.
“Tonight,” he announces, “I have a heavy heart.”
He pauses, waiting for the joyous faces to turn somber, matching his, and in a moment they do.
“There is evil in this world, a darkness of the unholy, that is taking our children,” he says, whispery, masterfully quiet. “I presided over a funeral today. A boy, only fifteen years old, cut down like so many of our young ones.”
Faces sag and heads nod as the crowd moves up and down on the arch of his words.
Cedric slips into a back row, unnoticed, looking haggard. He has on the same black jeans and knitted sweater with a rip under the arm that he wore to school. He walked a long time in the rain, ducking into a few shops, but mostly just walking. Eventually, he arrived at the subway on Martin Luther King Avenue, took the train to a stop in downtown D.C., and then had to wait for the bus to get here. His sweatered shoulders and short hair glisten with moisture.
All around, a cacophony is rising. Bishop Long has launched into a rousing sermon, and as he speaks, his rolling cadences echo through the sanctuary, bringing the three hundred parishioners—a fine turnout on a rainy night—to their feet.
“If you don’t have a dime in your pocket, if you don’t have food on your table, if you got troubles, you’re in the right place tonight,” he shouts, as people yell out hallelujahs, raise their arms high, and run through the aisles. Cedric sits passively tonight, keeping his distance.
His mind is still back on the streets of Southeast, and he tries to keep it there. Today he walked close by the crowds of men who stood in doorways and under awnings, watching him pass. He looked some of them in the eye, and nothing happened to him. He even stood a while under the letterless marquee of an abandoned movie theater a few blocks from the subway station on Martin Luther King. A bunch of wayward men about his father’s age were there. Cedric just stood with them and nodded, like he understood everything about them. It felt warm under there, comfortable and dry.
The congregation is clapping now, singing another song. Cedric looks around. A few ladies down the row look over at him, friends of his mother. He doesn’t want to clap, but one of them might tell his mother later—like there’s something wrong—and then he’ll have to deal with her. So he starts clapping a few times and then skips half a beat to get in time with everyone else.
The rhythm and sway of the room slowly begins to seep in. Another song starts up, one he used to sing up front that he hasn’t heard in what seems like forever, and, feeling some of the old juices flow, he ends up singing out and singing loud.
A lady in the row in front of him whom he’s known forever turns halfway around after the song and makes a motion—a silent, puckered-lipped “whooaaa”—that’s clearly about Cedric’s robust singing. A smile breaks across his face.
Bishop Long takes his spot back at the podium. He speaks haltingly, starting out slow. “I know all about it …. I know all about what you’re up against. I’ve been there. Trust me, I have. Do you trust me? Do you?” Long looks across each row of the room, at each face, with his one good eye. Cedric’s brow furrows. It’s like Bishop’s talking right to him. “Teeerrible things are happening!”—his voice begins to rise, gathering force. “You’re low, you’re tired, you’re fighting, you’re waiting for your vision to become reality—you feel you can’t wait anymore!”—he’s thundering—“Say ‘I’ll be fine tonight ’cause Jesus is with me.’ SAY IT! SAY IT!”
Cedric feels a wave crashing over him. He jumps to his feet, the spark back in his eyes. “Yes,” he shouts. “Yes!”
It’s a long service, and by the time mother and son pass the drug dealers and walk up the crumbling stairs to their apartment, it’s approaching midnight.
Barbara gets the mail. On top of the TV Guide is an orange envelope from the U.S. Treasury: a stub noting the direct dep
osit of her check and the automatic 10 percent deduction into a savings account for her church tithing.
Under the TV Guide is a creamy-white envelope.
Cedric grabs it from her. His hands begin to shake. “My heart is in my throat,” he says.
It’s from MIT.
Fumbling, he rips it open.
“Wait. Wait. ‘We are pleased to inform you … ’ Oh my God. Oh my God!” he begins jumping around the tiny kitchen. Barbara reaches out to touch him, to share it—her moment, too—but he spins out of reach.
“I can’t believe it. I got in,” he cries out, holding the letter against his chest, his eyes shut tight. “This is it. My life is about to begin.”
4
SKIN DEEP
Fifty-two pride and joys mill about in a wide, wood-paneled dormitory lobby, a small, select colony of minority achievers in cut-off jeans and faded college T-shirts, many of them laughing with the breezy, can-hardly-believe-it giddiness of someone collecting on a wager.
Standing among them, breathing in the cool, electric air of New England and MIT, Cedric feels reconstituted—bigger, somehow, than who he was before.
He’s in. He’s here. Two months ago he may have hated them without knowing them, he thinks, looking from one smiling brown face to the next, but that was just to gird himself against the possibility of rejection. All of it, at this instant, is meaningless prologue. Now, he’s one of them.
Looking out a tall foyer window at the dorm’s brick courtyard, tinted reddish gold by the late afternoon sun, Cedric is suffused with a sense of belonging, even though he is impossibly far from home. It has already been a long, adrenaline-filled day of breathless travel, from a plane boarded in humid Washington, to a special MIT van at Boston’s Logan Airport, to the top floors of a high-rise dorm overlooking the fabled Charles River, and, finally, into a genuine college dorm room, with clean sheets stacked neatly on a striped mattress.