by Ron Suskind
Not that this provides him much comfort. He has been cutting back on calls to his mother, not wanting to tell her that things aren’t going so well. Still, he thinks of her often and what she would say: “Don’t get down on yourself, Lavar, you can do anything you set your mind to.”
If she told him that right this second, he thinks he’d definitely respond, “Listen, Ma, it’s not that simple.” He takes the phone card his mother gave him from his wallet, dials a number, and waits a moment.
“Hey, Torrence,” Cedric says, sitting up on the bed. “It’s me, calling from Massachusetts.”
Torrence Parks is one of the Jefferson gang that Cedric checks in with from time to time. He’s now at Woodrow Wilson High School, one of the better D.C. high schools. Since they parted after junior high, Torrence and Cedric have kept in touch by phone. In their last call a few months ago, Torrence said he had recently become an enthusiast of Islam and was spending a lot of time at a local mosque.
Cedric lets on that things aren’t going so well, and Torrence is at the ready with sweeping explanations from Islamic dogma for Cedric’s unhappiness.
“It’s simple, Cedric. You should stick to your own,” he says. “You’re feeling bad, deep down, because you’re betraying your people, leaving them all behind, by going up to a big white university. Even if you manage to be successful, you’ll never be accepted by whites. You’re just being used by the white power structure to make them feel good, like they’re doing their part and giving a few select Africans a chance.”
Cedric, who usually argues these points, mumbles something unintelligible to let Torrence know he’s listening.
His friend is emboldened. “Look, you may not agree with me, but you have to admit that those kids know how to play the game of white academic success better than you do. And that’s why they’ll get ahead and you won’t. Am I right? I bet there are not a lot of real brothers up there.”
“Yeah, I guess not … I don’t know, Torrence. Look, I’m kinda tired. I think I fried my brain or something. I’ll talk to you later.”
He hangs up the phone, wondering if he has trouble arguing with Torrence because some of what he says may be right.
A few grueling days later—each day starting with a blistering exam and capped by an anxious late night of study—Cedric wakes up in a haze and goes to physics class. There’s a buzz in the room as midterms are handed back. Cedric forces himself to look down at the cover page: 4 points out of 26. Clean misses on three of the four word problems. He stands at his desk, walks out into the hallway, and lets out a scream.
Mr. Washington runs after him into the hall. “What’s wrong? Good God!”
Cedric, unable to speak, just waves the test paper at him.
“Come on, now,” says Washington. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. A lot of the material is new to lots of the kids. Just keep at it. It will get easier.” He looks carefully at Cedric, then tells him to take the morning off and go get some sleep.
In the afternoon, the calculus midterm comes back: 68 out of 104 possible points. God knows what Andrew Parker got, Cedric thinks, wandering out of the classroom, trying his best to look away from everybody and everything.
He avoids the MITES for the rest of the day. Walking across far reaches of the riverside campus until long after nightfall, he slips silently back into the room to turn in. Tossing and turning, too troubled to sleep, he sits up on his bed and looks out at the lights of MIT, trying on the hair shirt of failure, of his never making it to an undergraduate class at MIT or anywhere like it. The campus seems more beautiful than ever, with the white and yellow lights flickering at midnight over the football stadium. “I’ll never make it to this place,” he says to himself, seeing if he can say it. “I’m just fooling myself.”
As the hours pass, he falls in and out of sleep. When he wakes with a jolt, Cornelia Cunningham, an elder at Scripture Cathedral, is on his mind. A surrogate grandmother who had challenged and prodded Cedric since he was a small boy, “Mother Cunningham” died two weeks before he left for Cambridge. He packed the special pamphlet with her picture, biography, and her favorite prayers from her funeral in his suitcase for MIT.
At some unknown hour of the early morning darkness, Cedric feels like her spirit is with him in the room. He presses his eyes closed, not breathing, certain he can hear her saying, “Cedric, you haven’t yet begun to fight.”
A few hours later, he sits up, awake and befuddled, not sure if it was a dream, but then not caring, either. A message came through. He leaps out of bed and over to the desk, hunched forward in his pajamas, diving into calculus as never before.
The auditorium rings with raucous cheering as teams prepare their robots for battle. This is the culmination of a semester-long exercise in ingenuity and teamwork that the MITES do every year. In the program’s first week, each three-student team is given a small, remote-controlled engine and a box of levers, wheels, hooks, and plates to build a robot. Today, the robots will fight over a small soccer ball in an elimination tournament.
This year, something has gone awry. The trios, which in past years were carefully chosen and mixed by instructors with an eye toward racial diversity, were self-selected this year by the students. The kids did what came naturally: segregated themselves based on race. As the elimination rounds begin, “Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico!” is chanted from the Hispanic side.
Black students whoop as Cedric’s team fights into the quarterfinals. When they lose in a tough struggle, Cedric—momentarily unself-conscious—stumbles in mock anguish toward the black section, into the arms of Jenica and Isa, who are anxious to come to his aid.
Tutors look on nervously as the auditorium divides into an edgy call and response. “Latinos Live!” shouts a row of Hispanic boys. “Africa Forever!” comes the return cry from the other side.
The winner, oddly enough, is a team led by the MITES lone Caucasian—a boy from Oklahoma who qualified for the program because he is 1/128 Potawatomi Indian. Both camps are muted.
Bill Ramsey looks on sourly at the fractious scene. Now is the time, with just over two weeks left in the program, that natural divisions between the program’s blacks and Hispanics should be easing after a month of socializing and competition.
Not to worry, he thinks, leaving the auditorium and walking across campus. The racial dynamic of this group will soon evolve along the same grid as in classes of previous years: the kids eventually move past the initial division of black versus Hispanic to a solidarity along the deeper fault line—minority versus Caucasian—as they realize that they’ll all face similar challenges assimilating into the white professional class. They’ll get plenty of messages about this in the next two weeks, from counselor chats about future careers to class discussions in English about being successful while retaining one’s ethnic identity.
He strolls into his modest office on the second floor of Building #1 (here, most buildings have numbers rather than names) and hangs his blazer over the back of the chair. He begins rooting across his desk and through the drawers.
“Susie, where’s that damn file on the acceptance rates?” he yells through the open office door to his assistant, a West African woman who rolls her eyes. “I’m sure it’s around somewhere,” he murmurs, pawing through a few more desk drawers. “If people wouldn’t always borrow it.”
Requests for the numbers come steadily, from MIT’s admissions office, from journalists, from writers of academic newsletters, and from a slew of other programs that have modeled themselves on MITES. This is the Cadillac of university-based minority enrichment courses, and the numbers, at first glance, are stunning.
Susie finally finds the file in the outer office, peeks in the doorway with a smile, and drops it on Bill’s desk.
“Have I told you that you’re brilliant yet today?” he flatters her and then asks her for the file of a student who will be visiting in a few minutes.
He flips through the thick folder of data, though he knows these numbers by heart. On
average, 82 percent of the MITES who apply to MIT get accepted. His tracking of the kids is obsessive, prideful. Almost all the MITES who matriculate to MIT’s freshmen class end up graduating: sixteen graduates out of seventeen one year; another crop went eighteen for eighteen.
He puts the file in his out box to have some copies made as his assistant drops off the student file. It’s a black kid. There was a complaint from one of the girls from Puerto Rico about this kid being too touchy-feely with her a few days ago, making her uncomfortable. No big deal, happens around here a lot. Boys and girls, far from home, trying to figure things out.
He quickly reviews the file. Bad midterm grades, some comments from teachers and student tutors about him being volatile and depressed. Then a note from one of the student counselors about him seeming to emerge socially in just the last week or so. Fine, he thinks, so he’s feeling his way along.
He closes the file and leans back in his chair. Still a few moments until the kid arrives, so he looks out the window, something he’s doing an awful lot of these days, letting his mind drift elsewhere. He’s in good shape for a man of sixty-eight, still strong as a bull, though seven years running this program has taken a toll. When he first arrived, taking over a program that had been up and running for two decades, he had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America—kids who had somehow learned math and science in what are all but war zones—and give them the boost. Within his first year, he saw he’d been dreaming. A few kids he’d chosen from those bleak spots were much further behind academically than he’d ever imagined. And they’re further behind now than they were then. It would take two years of tutoring, not six weeks, to bring some of the inner cities’ brightest up to a level where they might be accepted to MIT. Their similarity to the polished, suburb-bred minority kids goes little more than skin deep. Is it fair to set them up for a fall, or maybe worse? He’s had a few of them over the years, ghetto kids, and he’s seen it play out: they come up here filled with hope, people back home banking everything on them as the one who will make it out, proving that people can make it out. And what happens? They get a taste of the big time and at the same time they learn that a taste is all they’ll ever get. A whole program of those kids, he’d be raising suicide rates at MIT, something they already have enough trouble with.
He’s run through this train of logic before, countless times. He strokes his brow, something he does when he feels stress coming on, and settles into his fallback position. It’s simple, he concludes. MIT wants minority undergraduates, and the program’s corporate sponsors eventually want minority employees. That’s why he’s ended up running a program filled with self-assured middle- or upper-middle-class black and Hispanic kids—leaders of tomorrow, all—many of whom are here for little more than résumé padding.
Still, every year he’ll find room for a few poor kids from bad schools. And they’re the ones that drive him crazy with yearning, the ones who dream in Technicolor but can’t integrate fractions to save their lives.
He chuckles—that last line’s not bad. Susie tells him the student has arrived, and he rises from his chair.
“Have a seat, Cedric,” Ramsey says gruffly. He runs through the complaint from the girl as Cedric sits still on the edge of the chair, wide-eyed, a “Please don’t throw me out” look on his face.
“Look, it’s no big deal. You’re not being sent home or anything,” says Ramsey, finally. “Just be careful when you flirt with the girls. Some of them can be a little sensitive.”
“Okay,” Cedric says. “I will. Or, I won’t, you know, whatever.”
“Fine,” says Ramsey, unable to suppress a smile. Then he pauses for a moment, not sure if he should take it any further. “Hasn’t been such an easy summer for you, has it?” he finally says.
“Naw,” says Cedric, looking down. “A lot this stuff, I just didn’t expect. I guess I thought there’d be more kids like me here.”
Ramsey nods, feeling his gut tighten. Just once, he’d like to rant a bit, to let a ghetto kid like this know that the affirmative action deck has been stacked, that the best of intentions, these days, mostly mean embracing upwardly mobile blacks and Hispanics who are likely to succeed, and that he shouldn’t blame himself for not being able to keep up with the others. But where to begin, what to say? Instead, after a moment, he stands, letting Cedric know the meeting’s over. “Look, just keep at it. There’s still two weeks left—a lot can happen in that time,” he says, as Cedric nods, thankful, it seems, for the encouragement, and quietly leaves.
Sitting alone in his small office, Ramsey shakes his head. It just seems like there’s no way to give kids like that credit for the distance they’ve already traveled. This Cedric had to run three more laps than the other kids, but he’s still two laps behind, so he loses. Beautiful. He starts to think about how long his own journey has been—how isolated he was as one of the only black undergraduates here in the early 1950s, the tensions in his family because some of them thought he was on his high horse, off to the big university. But, even now, he remembers that he knew with great clarity what he needed to do, how he needed to turn away from slights and confrontation and let his grades speak loudly for him. He felt like some sort of black pioneer whom others would follow.
He thought that by now there’d be a lot more black professors and students around here. He catches himself. He knows he shouldn’t go down this path—it always ends with him cursing and riled up, and he’s been feeling this way too many days of late. Because what the hell is this program doing with a white faculty director? Nice guy, Leon Trilling, done a lot for minorities, but come on. “Enough,” he says to himself. He can’t be getting all worked up, not at his age.
He rises and begins gathering his things to go home, looking out the window again, thinking of his lovely wife, his successful grown kids, and his retirement place in Saint Kitts, which more and more is beckoning to him.
The TV reception is lousy. Cedric flips the knob, adjusts the contrast, and fools with a mysterious red button, but all he can get are shadow images of the soulful Sisters With Voices, or SWV, mugging on MTV.
Someone’s behind him. He spins. The whole gang is standing in the doorway of the small TV room on MacGregor’s first floor: Mark and Belinda, another boy named Arryn, along with Jenica, Isa, and Micah. “Happy Birthday, Cedric,” Mark says in his raspy tough voice. “Here’s your present. It’s a ghetto bag, ’cause you’re soooo ghetto.”
Cedric hoots. He can’t believe this. His birthday is in a couple days, and the paper bag has condoms, M&Ms, Nivea skin creme, batteries for a boom box, a two-play rap CD—little stuff, nothing expensive. But it’s the idea that’s great, and everyone’s in on it. Ghetto! It has been Cedric’s favorite word in the past two weeks—his imprimatur of coolness. Someone can be ghetto in what they say or do or own—like cassettes or shirts or shoes—if they suggest the edgy urban version of blackness.
The whole thing, Cedric marveled a few days ago, is simply amazing. In this crowd of assimilated, careerist black and Hispanic kids, it is he, Cedric—king of the Ballou nerds, bottom of the Southeast D.C. pecking order—who can claim a particular brand of racial authenticity. Here, by default, he’s actually an arbiter of the fashions, tastes, and habits of inner-city life that exert some sway over young blacks of any stripe. Just amazing.
What’s happening, though, goes a bit deeper. Cedric is slowly letting his true self emerge. Midterms triggered it, forcing him to accept that he’s way behind the others and might as well reveal his background rather than hide it. What’s the point of putting up a false front, he finally decided, of affecting a posture like he’s some suburban doctor’s son hitting triples in every class? Yes, he’s way behind, academically. How could he not be, coming from Ballou?
So he’s opening himself up the only way anyone ever can: bit by bit. After presenting the birthday bag, some of the girls start talking about the activity-jammed weekend, which will start with a bus trip to Cape Cod the next
morning.
Everyone is going. “I can’t wait to see you swimming, Cedric,” flirts Isa.
“I can swim and all,” Cedric says, just in case anyone thinks he can’t. “But, I’m not going. Lots of work and stuff.” This prompts a pile-on. No one’s letting him slip away. It’s six on one. They all agree there must be some other reason, and then they bore in for the truth. Finally, he gives in: no bathing suit.
A moment later, he’s being dragged by a posse, amid much laughter, across a walking bridge over the Charles River to the posh stores on Boston’s Newbury Street. The girls fuss over which one looks best. Cedric says that it needs to be big in the crotch, and there’s some wrestling among the racks, giggling and arm punching.
On the bus to the Cape, he’s at his buoyant best, leading the group in song, bouncing with ease through an array of hip-hop hits. Singing in front of the other kids feels fine, with people clapping and humming, affirming his specialness, sort of like he used to feel in church. He has replaced gospel classics with rhythm-and-blueser Warren G, hip-hopper R. Kelly, and rapper Da Brat. He knows every lyric and vocal inflection of countless tunes—about violence or romance, about fearless men and sex-hungry women—songs that are a fixture of his proscribed, secondhand life back home.
The next night, July 24, his seventeenth birthday, he brings a plastic bag of cassettes onto the Boston Line ferry for a dance-party cruise around Boston Harbor. “Wow. You really know music,” the black DJ says as Cedric runs through a playlist from his collection.
“Well, it’s sort of all I got,” Cedric says, shrugging. He spends much of the evening happily watching a bunch of very smart kids dance to his tunes.