A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  Barbara goes to the kitchen to see if there’s any ginger ale left, and maybe some crackers, while Cedric slumps over on the couch and reads the letter again. Next thing, she feels him peck her on the cheek.

  “Whatchyou doing, Lavar?” she says, spinning around, startled.

  “Ma … ummm … thanks,” he whispers.

  She gently cups his cheek in the palm of her hand, knowing there’s nothing she needs to say.

  “You know,” he says after a moment, “I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll turn in,” and he shoots her a smile as he turns for the hallway.

  “Yeah, me too,” she says, though she feels like she could stay up half the night. And she does, sitting on the couch in the TV’s glow as her mind wanders far forward on a freshly cut path that now seems to pass through Providence, Rhode Island.

  Even though Cedric has finally received the golden acceptance, Barbara and he—almost by reflex—keep to their rituals as though nothing has occurred. Barbara, for one, has been going to PTA meetings for a dozen years. Never missed one, even during the worst times, and she isn’t about to miss one now.

  So, one night in mid-January, she dresses carefully—as always, mindful of making a good impression at school—and leaves for a meeting of Ballou’s PTSA (the S added a few years ago to make students feel welcome). Tonight’s meeting is a sparsely attended affair. About twenty-five parents gather in the auditorium’s first three rows as PTSA president James Bunn, who operates a tax preparation storefront in Southeast, speaks to the group about “the crisis of parental involvement … we’re talking about the lives of our children.”

  Barbara, resplendent in a flowing maroon-and-gold sleeveless dress with African designs on top of a white double-knit T-shirt, looks over her shoulder at the rising slope of empty seats behind her. She has been stirred by such speeches in countless half-filled auditoriums and cafeterias through the years, and it feels strange to her to be able to tune it out. On the way into school tonight, she bumped into one of Cedric’s former teachers—sophomore class, she thinks—who congratulated her on his getting into Brown, and then an administrator who did the same. Everyone knows that Cedric has received the coveted acceptance letter. Cedric said he wasn’t surprised but acted like it was a letter straight from God. Made twenty copies to pass out the day after he got it.

  Twenty copies!? That boy, she thinks, is so outgoing sometimes, so out there—not quiet, like her. She looks at him in the seat next to her, admiringly, and then motions for him to stop tapping his foot, that it’s driving her crazy. Cedric told her yesterday that he wanted to come tonight to see his grades for the advisory, that he must see them “the moment they’re available, or I’ll just die.” Grade sheets are passed to parents on PTSA night as a prop to build attendance and because, otherwise, many report cards wouldn’t make it into the hands of any parent—with shrewd kids knowing when and how to intercept a key piece of unopened mail.

  After the PTSA president finishes, everyone wanders from the auditorium to designated homerooms. Barbara follows Cedric upstairs to the second-floor classroom of Ms. Wingfield, a quiet black woman who has been Cedric’s homeroom teacher since ninth grade. She lights up when she sees Barbara, clasping both her hands in congratulations. “You’ve won a great victory, Ms. Jennings,” she says.

  A moment later, Ms. Wingfield passes out the grade sheets. Cedric grabs it from Barbara’s hand and gasps. “I got a B in physics! I can’t believe it.”

  He begins ranting about the cheating in his class, about how he thinks a lot of other kids cheated on the main exam for this advisory. Barbara remembers that he mentioned something about this a week ago—but she dismissed the whole matter.

  Squeezed into a school desk next to him, she wants to tell Cedric that it doesn’t matter. None of it. Some small hubbub about cheating and grades is meaningless now that he’s been admitted to Brown, the top college acceptance of any Ballou student in years.

  But, of course, he knows all that, too. And the more dismissive her look, the more rabid he becomes. Then she gets it: it’s about her watching over him, defending him, always being there. “ … I mean, what are we going to do?!” he shouts at the end of his furious soliloquy about what’s right and fair and just.

  She’s up. “Well, Lavar, we’ll just have to go have a word with that teacher.” A second later, they’re stomping together through the halls, headed for the physics classroom of an unsuspecting Mr. Momen. They find that he is alone. He turns and offers greetings as they enter, but Cedric launches right in—the whole diatribe, offered with added verve from his rehearsal with his mom.

  Mr. Momen, a wry, sometimes sarcastic man in his mid-forties, mournfully shakes his head, a helmet of gray-flecked hair. “Cedric, you got a B for the marking period,” he says in precise, accented English. “The test for you is irrefutable. The curve says yours is a B, and that, for you, is a B for the marking period. So, okay. That’s it, yes?”

  “But kids are cheating! You leave the room and they open the book. Lots of them. You don’t know what goes on. You shouldn’t leave the room, that’s when it starts. It ends up that I get penalized ‘cause I won’t cheat.”

  “Cedric, stop. I can’t, myself, just accuse all of them of cheating,” says Mr. Momen, shrugging.

  Barbara watches the give-and-take, realizing that the teacher has artfully shoved Cedric into a rhetorical corner by placing her son’s single voice against the silent majority—his word against theirs.

  Years of practice at this have taught her much: choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction. “My son doesn’t lie,” she says, like an oracle, “not about something like this.”

  The silent majority vanishes. She stands, straight and motionless, a block of granite. Momen looks back at her, eye to eye. Soon, the silence becomes unbearable. He’s forced to move. “I guess he could take a retest I make for him,” he says haltingly. “It will be a hard test, though, that I will make for you, Cedric.”

  “Fine,” says Barbara, closing the deal. “Thank you, Mr. Momen. We can go now,” she says. Once they’re in the hallway, she whispers to Cedric, “You will be getting an A on that test, Lavar. You understand?” She doesn’t expect an answer.

  After a week of ferocious study, Cedric does get his A on the special test—scoring 100—and an A for the marking period. He brings home the paper and lays it on the dining room table, like a prize, a trophy.

  Barbara looks at it for a moment. “On the next stop, you know you’ll be on your own. I won’t be there to come to the rescue,” she says, feeling as though a clause of their partnership has expired.

  “Well, then,” he says a little tersely, tapping the paper once with his index finger, “I guess this paper is sort of your diploma.”

  By the end of February, she can already feel him moving ahead, his eyes now locked on Brown. Sure, he asks her about this and that, but she finds she hasn’t much to say. She’s learning, day by day, just how little guidance she can offer for that journey. When he comes home one night in early March and asks if LaTisha is right in worrying that Cedric may lose his identity at Brown, Barbara shakes her head non-committally. She roots through some well-worn references—a little New Testament, a little self-help. She has no idea what a large, distant, mostly white university looks like, what sort of challenges Cedric may face “up there.”

  “As long as you’re a whole person,” she says finally, paraphrasing something Bishop Long once said, “you have nothing to worry about. You’ll always be sure of who you are.”

  He looks at her, clearly unconvinced, rises from his chair with an exasperated “Whateveeeeer,” and retreats toward his room.

  Barbara Jennings sits in the straight-backed dining room chair, completely still—wondering if she just got her first glimpse of the future—and listens for his door to click shut.

  Cedric steps onto a courtyard of white marble and looks way up. He reads the phrase “Equal Justice Under Law” a
nd tries to make out the characters carved just above it, a row of squatting, deliberating white men from some period of antiquity or other—Greek, maybe, he thinks—but muscular, like black men.

  He clutches his spiral notebook and looks around, suddenly self-conscious. He heads for the entrance, feeling smaller with each step up the vast marble staircase of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Near the top step, he has to veer around a cluster of high-school-age kids who are listening to a tour guide. Cedric, living just two miles away, has never been here. No class trips. No family visits. No reason to come. Until now.

  He walks inside the court’s six-ton bronze doors to the metal detector. “I’m here to see Clarence Thomas,” he says tentatively.

  “Do you have an appointment?” a black security guard asks, firm but curious.

  “Yes, yessir, I do,” Cedric says, standing to his full five-foot-ten, having picked up a few inches this year. “I mean,” he shrugs, “I think he’s expecting me.”

  Now, three years after his blistering confirmation battle in 1991, the justice is firmly established as Washington’s most famous recluse. The hearings left Thomas dazed and stumbling into an afterlife of bizarre duality: as both the most powerful black man in America and a walking, grimacing Rorschach on wrenching issues of race and gender. His uniform response, for years now, has been to withdraw, to shun media inquiries and most invitations for social events and speaking engagements.

  There is, though, one quiet act of outreach: he meets periodically with promising black students from the area—generally, poor kids with good grades—to mentor and guide them. In a profile in the Washington Post around the time of Cedric’s visit, a longtime Thomas aide said that visiting with young people “helps him heal.”

  Last year, Cedric was featured in a story in the Wall Street Journal about kids at Ballou High School that was read by Justice Thomas, who put him on his visitation list. Though months of phone messages and rescheduled appointments pushed this meeting to mid-March, it is occurring at a time when Cedric—by virtue of the natural rhythms of his final springtime of high school—feels a particular need for advice, for counsel from someone, anyone, who can offer insight about where he is bound.

  Standing on the other side of the metal detector, Cedric is directed to the Supreme Court marshall’s office, where one of Thomas’s assistants is called to escort him to the justice’s chambers.

  “Are you Cedric Jennings?” comes a voice from the doorway a few minutes later. Cedric spins. A smallish black man in his mid-twenties is smiling at him. “Hi, I’m Justice Thomas’s assistant. I’ll be escorting you. My name’s Wayne Graham, like the cracker.”

  Cedric nods and off they go, as Wayne explains that the justice is finishing some work and he’ll be delayed a few minutes.

  As they walk, everything Cedric sees looks outsized and incredibly white. He has rarely felt so conspicuously black. Maybe it’s something about the marble, he thinks, as they move through the Great Hall, a sort of grand corridor leading to the court’s majestic courtroom. They walk past shimmering marble busts of dead chief justices—a grumpy Charles Evans Hughes, a stately John Marshall, a sweetly dopey William Howard Taft—under a marble ceiling that’s got to be eighty feet up. The only shades, here, seem to be shades of white, Cedric muses, like it must be in heaven.

  Wayne makes small talk as they tour and buys Cedric a ham sandwich in the first-floor cafeteria before delivering him to the second-floor offices marked simply “Justice Thomas.”

  In here, everything changes. It feels cozy and warm. The walls are oak. The two Thomas assistants who smile at him as he enters are black women, both sitting at desks in the reception area under large, colorful paintings of black workers in the rural south. A few handsome young white guys in their middle or late twenties walk through the reception area and smile at him.

  Cedric’s eyes are drawn straight ahead to a large painting of slaves—or maybe just poor blacks—in a field picking cotton and loading bales onto a horse-drawn wagon.

  At the secretary’s behest, he sits at a small mahogany desk and chair ensemble near the door, a desk crammed with potted plants and odd wooden signs on mini-easels. He notices they’re all over the office—little inspirational billboards: “There is no limit to what you can do or where you can go, if you don’t mind who gets the credit” says one; “To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing,” says another. He squints to read what’s across the room on the credenza: “He who will not listen to reason is a bigot, he who cannot is a fool, he who dares not is a slave.” He bends forward and around to read one he missed, right next to him on the desk: “No word spoken here is ever repeated outside these walls.”

  Nothing inspirational about that one, Cedric thinks, as he sits back. The paranoid, monstrous Thomas of the public’s imagination comes into view. Words and images that have been bumping around in Cedric’s head for weeks—ever since this meeting date was set—come rushing in, one after another—the justice sitting at the Senate hearing table; Coke cans and pubic hairs; Long Dong Silver; “high-tech lynching;” and then Anita Hill’s angelic face, cool under fire. He feels his gut tighten. Cedric wonders if he should ask Thomas about Anita Hill. He’d love to, in a way, just ask him, straight out, What went on there? But he dismisses that notion quickly as Thomas’s angry face seems to float before him.

  A moment later, that image is replaced. “Glad you could come, Cedric,” says Justice Clarence Thomas, reaching out a thick, hammy hand. Cedric smiles dumbly, holds out his fingers, and is jerked to consciousness by the justice’s crushing grip. He’s led through an airlock of huge oak doors that lead to Thomas’s chambers and onto a large, blue leather couch. Thomas pulls up a chair for himself. Cedric can’t take his eyes off him. The guy is huge—only about five-foot-nine but wide and stacked like a pro football player, his biceps straining the fabric of his white dress shirt.

  Thomas begins talking about the Journal story, about how he sees and mentors a lot of young people and then about some program he helps run—the Horatio Alger Society—that supports top black students with scholarships. “You know, that might be something for you to get involved with, Cedric.”

  Sunk deep in the couch, Cedric feels like ocean waves are crashing in his ears. He nods, telling Thomas he’ll get involved “for sure. That’d be great.”

  The justice leans forward in his chair and looks intently at Cedric, clearly able to see the film across the youngster’s eyes. “You know, Cedric,” he says softly, “I sense that you and I are a lot alike. I have a sense of what you’ve been through.”

  Hearing those words, Cedric seems to calm. He meets Thomas’s gaze and smiles, feeling his face muscles loosen. “This is quite an office,” Cedric says as his eyes wander from the paintings of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass to a picture on the mantel of a young man about his own age, who must be Thomas’s son, and then to a foot-high religious statuette on the end table near Cedric’s right hand.

  “That’s St. Jude,” Thomas says. “You know what he’s the saint of?”

  Cedric, unaware of Catholic dogma, shrugs, though he’s happy to feel the conversation land on the terra firma of religion.

  “Causes beyond hope,” Thomas says. “Hope for the hopeless.”

  “I know something about that,” Cedric says, proud to get off a quick quip. Thomas heartily laughs, scrunching his nose in a way that makes him look boyish.

  Staring at the statue, he begins reminiscing, telling Cedric how he won it for placing first in the annual Latin Bee at a nearly all white high school—a Catholic boarding school—that he attended in Savannah in the mid-1960s.

  “After I won it, I put it on my bureau in the big, open dorm room where we all slept. A few days later, I looked over and saw the head was broken off, lying there right next to the body on my bureau where I’d be sure to see it. I glued it back on. After another few days, it happened again. So I got more glue—put it on real thick—and fixed it again. Whoeve
r was breaking it must have gotten the message: I’d keep gluing it forever if I needed to. I wasn’t giving up.”

  Cedric looks again at the statue—its neck jagged and chipped—and then back at Thomas, trying to imagine what this imposing man, now in his late forties, looked like at sixteen. The dark images of Clarence Thomas are now easy to discard. Instead, Cedric sees a solitary Supreme Court justice who still remembers slights from three decades ago. That broken statue is the same sort of cheap shot that is slung at Cedric each day, he muses, and here this guy has managed to get pretty far despite all the naysayers. Cedric wonders, though, how many of the indignities he’s suffered at Ballou he’ll still carry with him a decade or two from now.

  “Sounds like you had to fight every step of the way,” Cedric says, egging Thomas on, wanting to hear more.

  Leaning back in his chair, his wing tips on the magazine table between them, the justice is anxious to oblige. He tells about being an illegitimate child, how his mother was overwhelmed and his grandfather eventually raised him under iron codes of discipline. Cedric is prompted to open up about his dad, and the church, and how his mother “tells you to do it once, and never twice.” When Cedric mentions how hard he studies—nights, weekends, and summers—Thomas recalls how he learned algebra one summer after he got his hands on an old textbook. And around they go, matching each other—Cedric laughing, Thomas chewing on an unlit Macanudo and waving it as a prop—as an hour goes by, then another.

  Thomas talks about growing up speaking Gullah, a pig English that was common among blacks in parts of the rural south, especially along the Atlantic seaboard, and is still spoken on some Caribbean islands. “For me, English was a second language—still is, I guess,” he says, and Cedric laughs, realizing that Thomas, who speaks with the practiced precision of James Earl Jones, is joking. “I just worked at it, Cedric, working on my pronunciations, sounding out words. That’s why I became an English major as an undergraduate at Holy Cross. I didn’t say much in class. I was afraid, afraid of being embarrassed. But eventually, I knew I could speak properly. I got some confidence, but I had to work for it, to earn it.”