A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  Barbara’s up, screaming, “THAT’S MY SON!” loud enough that even Cedric can hear her, and he squints over toward her voice, trying to see—but he doesn’t need to. He feels her inside him.

  Now the frog prince is flying, up on his toes, preaching, reaching down and, in a flash, he sees his mother standing by the white couch, pointing at him, dropping her finger slowly, like a gun. Remembering every word, he lets it rip.

  “For the race is not given to the swift nor to the strong,” he signifies, “but to him who endureth until the end!” The mothers, the powerful churchwomen, start to cry out from all corners, and distinctions between the cool stage and the surrounding lowlands are gone as the room thumps as one big tent revival.

  Cedric goes on to finish the speech, ending nicely with the Langston Hughes poem, but he knows—even as he recites it—that no one will remember much of the end. All they’ll remember is that some boy preached today.

  LaCountiss Spinner gives a tame, respectful valedictory speech, mostly thanking a lot of teachers; and Mayor Barry arrives, about an hour late, to present the Mayor’s Academic Achievement Award to three students on the stage, including Cedric. As he places a silver medal around Cedric’s neck, Barry quips, “Sure is nice to see a young man up here.”

  Students finally start snaking up for their diplomas. Cedric, suffused with warmth and relief, listens intently as the crowd cheers, like when they all marched in, but more ardently this time. Whole families watch and hug, waving programs, clasping hands, standing on chairs, sweat pouring down their faces. Each family has one of their own up there, after all. Cedric can’t help but notice that the loudest ovation is for Phillip Atkins, who offers a gentle nod to the assembled, having traded much for the applause.

  Outside, afterward, the air is finally cooling. Everyone floods from the school’s portico and into the apricot sunset, glad to breathe again.

  Cedric is floating. He sees James Davis, whom he made up with a few weeks ago, being hugged by several girls at once. Cedric laughs, feeling giddy. A few feet in the other direction, Phillip works the crowd, collecting a final round of hugs and high fives from all strata of Ballou’s society. Cedric wants to go over to him, congratulate him, feeling like some of his demons have finally vanished, like all that’s behind him now.

  But he’s waylaid. Strangers and people he barely knows are shaking his hand, congratulating him on the speech. Classmates are smacking his back, punching his shoulder, finally accepting him, he muses, now that it’s all over.

  After a moment, he finds he has drifted toward an oak tree where his family is waiting and overhears Neddy say, “Ma, you’ve got your life back now that Lavar’s graduated and he’s ready to move on.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” he hears his mom murmur, clearly not wanting to think about that now. When she turns, he’s already standing close, looking right at her. He’s holding an armful of awards against the gown’s embroidered chest, saying everything with his smile.

  And Cedric Lavar Jennings stands up nice and straight as Barbara—after so many pinched years—finally loses control, letting out a lusty “MY BAAAAABY!” and throwing her arms hard around him.

  6

  THE PRETENDER

  Sitting in the small, sterile offices of Price Waterhouse Accounting LLP in northern Virginia, sorting office keys, Cedric considers how the summer after high school must be a strange in-between period for everyone on the college track—a neither-here-nor-there time.

  So it’s only natural to feel confused and impatient and a little disembodied, he figures, as he methodically slips four newly cut keys—each with the number 56 for some accounting executive’s office of the same number—onto a tiny metal ring and throws it into the cardboard box marked “finished.” The drudge work never seems to be finished in this summer job, a deadly, dull, $8-an-hour internship obtained through a national program called Inroads that assists promising minority kids.

  Boring is boring, no point in stressing about it. It’s already July and this job, along with so much else that marks his final days in Washington, will slip gently into past tense when he journeys north in six weeks.

  So why can’t he seem to relax, he wonders, and simply enjoy the summer? Not that some of it hasn’t been okay. He’s making a little cash and getting ready to step up to something he’s dreamed about for so long. It’s just that so much of the good that’s befallen him seems to have an unsettling underside. Every sunny expanse seems to have a corner in the shadows.

  He roots through the loose-keys box for the fourth number 57 and recalls the moment—almost a month ago—when he was sitting on a curb in front of Filene’s Basement department store in Northwest, fretting over the contents of a giant red bag. Inside were two suits—one seersucker, one pale grayish—that were sent by Donald Korb, a Boston optometrist and contact lens inventor who last year became interested in Cedric’s achievement.

  A benefactor isn’t that strange—not these days. Quite a few kids at Ballou have some distant person who makes an effort on their behalf. Phillip and LaTisha, for instance, have the newsletter company magnate from Maryland who sponsors them and dozens of other kids through the “I Have a Dream” foundation. If any of them decide to go to college, their tuition and expenses will be paid. Cedric’s guy is a solo player. Dr. Korb read about Cedric in the Wall Street Journal story and has paid for periodic tutoring and incidentals, mostly books and some school clothes. A gentle, good-natured Jewish guy of sixty-one—who hasn’t spent more than a few minutes with Cedric but has very strong, principled feelings about him—he sent the suits in late May when he heard Cedric would be working the summer at an accounting firm. Sitting on the curb, Cedric mulled over how nice it was for Dr. Korb to do this, while he fretted over his inability to put the garments on his body. They’re old white man suits, he muttered as he peeked into the billowy plastic Filene’s bag to see if maybe the clothes had somehow changed color and pattern. “Who does he want me to be? Someone who wears suits like this, or who I really am?” Cedric finally blurted out, not even caring if passersby heard him. Half an hour later, he’d exchanged the suits for a store credit of $258, which he used to buy eighteen assorted graduation gifts for himself, teachers, administrators, his mother, and a few friends.

  It was a confusing moment, like so many lately. It was a good thing returning the suits and then being able to pass out graduation presents, but he felt like he was between worlds, like he was leaving one world and, at best, merely a pretender in the other.

  Cedric finishes sorting a box of keys and suddenly checks his watch. Almost 5:30, quitting time, and he looks down at his delicately checked shirt, smoothing the silky fabric with his hand. It was his first major clothing purchase, made after he got his first two-week paycheck last week. No Goodwill stuff, not this time—the plaid shirt is a Montel Williams label, for $70; the black linen pants were $70; and the black-and-white saddle bucks cost another $60.

  Wearing the outfit today, he feels sleek and transformed—a boring job for sure, but look what it gets you. He makes sure he passes the black receptionist on his way out. They had a funny conversation today about how she uses what she calls her “Vanna White voice” on the office intercom. Cedric waves an affectionate “till tomorrow” as he leaves, juking by, nodding at her conspiratorially, to show he knows she’s really a ghetto girl.

  He has a few hours before Thursday prayer meeting at church, so he trolls a mall in Georgetown. He almost never comes over to this side of town, but last year he visited this mall once—a sumptuous four-story complex with clothes he sees in magazines and a good record shop—and had often thought of returning. The stuff he sees today is truly amazing—fabrics like butter, fountains tinkling in an airy arboretum near the food court, a pair of Versace shoes in one store that he’d give anything to buy. It’s so lovely and transporting, in fact, that he manages not to notice for quite a while how salespeople are heading him off before he gets two steps inside each establishment. Not that this is any hug
e surprise; it happened last time. There are almost no black shoppers here. It’s just that he hoped the Montel Williams ensemble would ease his passage, that people might look at him like something other than a threat. By the time he leaves, he wonders if, with his next paycheck, he ought to splurge for a suit, something stylish and a bit more traditional. Maybe it would be easier if he came wearing that, looking more like a young professional.

  When he gets home that night, he gets a call from LaTisha. Cedric hasn’t talked to her since he saw her for lunch right after school ended. But it was an awkward meeting. At one point, Cedric remembers, he talked about Brown, about his dorm, about talking to his roommate—a white kid from Marblehead, Massachusetts—and LaTisha kind of glazed over, like, suddenly, they had nothing to talk about anymore. It made him uncomfortable.

  Tonight, though, there’s plenty of news and catching up to do. LaTisha starts by telling Cedric she just heard something terrible about Marvin Peay, a guy from Ballou Cedric knew pretty well, who was planning to attend a vocational school in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was working his night job at a McDonald’s near the Capitol with two other employees when all three were killed by a fourth coworker, who decided to rob the safe. The papers, LaTisha says, reported that it was the fifth triple homicide in the District in ten months.

  Cedric is stunned about Marvin, who was a nice quiet sort. He tells her about an old Jefferson friend of his named Henry Wimbush, who was just killed dealing drugs. He found all this out, Cedric continues, from Torrence Parks, who ended up not graduating from Wilson High because he flunked senior English and his parents—incensed about his failure and his growing affection for Islam—threatened to throw him out of the house. He’s now working at Burger King.

  LaTisha tells him she saw Phillip Atkins. He’s working sorting envelopes in the mail room of the newsletter company owned by the guy who helps fund the “I Have a Dream” program. LaTisha, whose small UDC tuition will be paid by the program, says the mail room job is “like a consolation prize” for anyone who’s not planning to go to college. “And you know Phillip,” she says. “Real smart, but, like a lot of folks we know, there’s no way he’s ever getting much past the mail room.”

  Half listening, Cedric’s mind wanders back to graduation. What a beautiful sunny dusk it was, he remembers. Everyone looked so good, smiling in their gowns, and a sort of airborne hopefulness was everywhere. Cradling the receiver with his shoulder while he does the dishes and LaTisha runs through one story of woe after another, he feels that unsettling, in-between feeling again and tells her he has to turn in early.

  Trying to fall asleep, Cedric can’t stop thinking about the depressing tally, how Torrence will probably still be at Burger King five years from now and Phillip will have long since reconciled himself to being the funniest guy in the mail room. He thinks about how Marvin might have looked after he was shot, and Henry, too, and what Torrence looks like with one of those stupid paper hats. It makes him feel sad and kind of scared, so he runs through all of it again while trying not to feel anything.

  Barbara?”

  She immediately recognizes the voice on the phone but finds it hard to respond with more than a grunt.

  “Ummm, it’s me—Cedric Gilliam. Did Lavar tell you I talked to him about a concert, that I wanted to ask you about it … ” and she listens as he goes through it, the when and where and that there won’t be any drinking or drugs.

  She’s been waiting for this call. Cedric Gilliam is out now, paroled last November after agreeing to get drug treatment and continue with his hair-cutting job. Not that he came to see Lavar over the winter or spring. Just in the last few weeks, though, as his son gets ready to depart, he’s made a play at establishing a relationship. The two of them have talked on the phone a few times, and it’s been cordial.

  Two weeks ago, after one of the calls, Lavar told Barbara about his father’s invitation to the concert—something called the Budweiser Concert Series at the D.C. Armory in late July, featuring three of Cedric’s favorite acts: Patti LaBelle, TLC, and Mary J. Blige.

  While she’s become something of an expert on how teenage boys search ruinously for approval from their wayward fathers, she also knows that standing between a father and son can be a disastrous move—the kind of thing that often makes a boy want the companionship of his father even more, as a form of rebellion. She’s thought a lot about what to do in the last few days but is still unsure exactly how to proceed.

  So she listens as Gilliam rambles on and on. The more he talks, the more she remembers her inability to trust him, to trust anything he says. It’s only one month until the race ends, until Lavar is safely settled in at a prestigious university far from Southeast. That single fact underlies everything. She knows this is Cedric Gilliam’s last chance to make a connection, to get on the road to some form of relationship with his son. But she’d be a fool to chance an incident at a concert where, of course, there will be alcohol and, of course, there will be drugs and, very possibly, violence.

  Finally, she cuts him off. “I didn’t raise him to be in that kind of atmosphere,” she says, cool, calm, and steady. “I don’t want him in that kind of a place. There’s just no reason he needs to be there.”

  It’s a total defeat. Gilliam crumbles under Barbara’s moral force, and she feels some guilty satisfaction.

  “I’m sorry …. I just didn’t think there was any harm to it,” he says, and, a moment later, the phones are returned to their cradles.

  She looks over at Lavar, who happened to be in the kitchen when the phone rang and has been wandering in and out of the vicinity throughout the conversation. He just nods, saying that “it was no big deal or anything” in a toneless voice that seems practiced to reveal nothing.

  On Cedric’s eighteenth birthday, July 24, they eat takeout spare ribs—a rare treat. There has been no other fanfare for the birthday. Cedric mentioned it in passing to people at work, but there was no cake or anything. Barbara has never been much to fuss over birthdays, so the ribs will suffice.

  As the days until his departure grow few, Barbara has been mindful to steer conversations toward loose ends—things Cedric may need to know when she’s not there. Cedric, anxious about what’s ahead, helps her along with a steady stream of questions and requests.

  “My last wish,” he says, gnawing on a rib, “is I want to be driven to college in an Infiniti. A Q45. I love the Q45. How much can it cost to rent one? You can attach a U-haul on the back.”

  She smirks at him. “Next summer, when you’re working at Price Waterhouse again, you can rent an Infiniti and drive around all summer if you want. On my money, we renting a plain ol’ minivan.”

  The conversation crests this way and that, but the theme of money rises again to the surface, as it often does. “Someday, when you’re a man,” she says absently, “you’ll be paying your own way with no problem.”

  “I’m a man.”

  She puts down the rib. “What did I tell you a man was?”

  “What?”

  “A man,” she says, like reciting a mantra, “takes care of himself physically, financially, and spiritually. And I mean, TOTALLY. Nobody else helping.”

  “I take care,” he says, venturing onto uneven terrain.

  “Not financially you don’t, not yet.”

  Barbara gets up for a glass of water as Cedric picks through a mountain of rib bones, piled in the middle of the table on the takeout bag. She knows he’s anxious for her to finally concede that he’s a man, but she’s in no rush. That he still relies on her for that affirmation is among her most valuable assets, something she’s won, she feels, by mixing her affection with real firmness, by not giving approval or praise unless it’s warranted. Sometimes she worries that he’ll seek proof of his manhood elsewhere. But not often. He wants her to say he’s a man, and she’ll say it when he’s earned it. Not a second before.

  The TV is blaring, as usual, offering a ready partner if either needs to momentarily turn away from the exhaust
ing, heart-pricking thrust and parry that sometimes passes for conversation in this cramped apartment.

  When they pick up the thread again, Barbara offers a bit of conciliatory praise, about how Sister Sharp, one of her fellow missionaries, told her at church last Sunday that “you were very mannerly. ‘I don’t know what he does at home,’ she said to me, ‘but he has very good manners. You done a good job.’

  “And, what I told her, Lavar, is that ‘when a child knows right from wrong, you don’t have to worry about him. And the way they learn is by being told in a way that they really listen. You tell them once and back it up, so you don’t have to tell him twice.’”

  Cedric moves the conversation over to the Sharp girls, two beautiful, leggy sisters—children of a police detective—who are both flourishing at the University of Maryland.

  “Yes, they’re peacocks. Lavar, I seen you watch the way they walk and everything. Any man would watch. Attraction like that often leads to other things, to a man making a fool of himself.”

  Cedric fidgets in his chair. They’ve stumbled into the eye of the storm—the issues of love, sex, and marriage—and the two of them just stare at each other. “So,” he says, moving first, “how do you know what love is?”

  “Well, you know because you can be yourself with that person.”

  “Okay, but how would you know it’s not just lust?”

  “’Cause if it’s love, Lavar, you won’t want to sleep with the person. You understand, it’s too precious a thing for that. You need to know who you are and you need to know who they are. And that’s enough. Really knowing another person of the other sex can be very exciting.”

  Barbara has run these lines through her head many times, figuring Cedric would eventually press her on the subject and sort of hoping he would. But, wading in, she realizes she’s on anything but firm ground. Looking at him intently across the table, she knows that she can’t recall much about the urgent issues of an eighteen-year-old boy. She has little idea what’s really going on in her son’s head.