A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  Eating his chicken, Douglas starts into a routine about Barbara’s mother telling her father to “bring that big old thing over here”—some sort of sexual reference—and Cedric is soon laughing hysterically along with the table of Jennings sisters. The talk is fast, riffing between subjects and inside references, and Cedric gets seconds, then thirds.

  He jumps up, says he can’t wait to cut the cake, and opens a large box to see the creamy white rectangle with “Congratulations, Cedric” in blue icing. “Cedric??” he says in mock confusion as everyone turns. “Oh, uhhuh. Cedric, dat’s just my professional name.” This, as always, gets big laughs.

  Soon the little kids are running down from upstairs, having heard about the cake. There’s a lightness to everything, a sense that anything is possible. Someone says that Cedric should touch the heads of the children “so to pass on the gift of intelligence.” Little Lawrence and the others squirm and dodge as Cedric shouts, “Come here, you,” chasing them. He corners Lawrence long enough to tap his forehead.

  All the talk of the future, of gifts being passed on, makes Daisy, the oldest sister, want to say a few words. That’s why they’re here, after all. To wish Lavar well.

  “Come on ya’ll,” she says purposefully. Somebody turns off the TV, and a circle forms around the dining room table as everyone joins hands—Cedric next to his mother—and squeezes their eyes shut.

  “God,” Daisy begins, her voice searching for a comfortable pitch. “We ask you to bless Lavar. Oh boy, God bless him ….”

  It is expected that inspiration will arrive, that Daisy will feel the Spirit and the words will spill forth. It takes a moment to happen, and then her voice grows steady and firm.

  “Everything that his hand touches, let it turn good …. Oh Yes! Lord, let him bring a good report back to his family. Let him succeed, Lord, in this long journey!”

  The last fiery words are barely out when Cedric, his eyes closed, feels an ache about the length of the journey—winding and treacherous, into unexplored country—and Daisy seems to feel it, too, because her voice drops to a plea. “Oh please,” she says, softly, “we’re praying that you shield him and protect him. And let him not be brought down …. And even when he is far away, God, let him know that he is loved by his family.” It is better that their eyes are closed, better to see beyond this shabby room and their plain clothes, as they all say, “Amen.”

  After a few hours, the party ends, and Cedric—full from the feast and warmed by a round of hugs—ambles outside onto the lamplit street. He walks a few blocks, smiling back at the black folks who nod at him from stoops or from the doorways of bodegas, and then finds himself checking the street signs.

  It’s not far from here, he thinks, not far at all. A few minutes later, he’s rounding the corner on 15th Street. He wanders a bit, perplexed, having come onto the block from an unfamiliar direction. He’s not sure which house it is—even though he lived here, on and off, as a kid and was here four years ago when his grandfather died. He begins studying the front facades, his step slowing.

  He walks by a porch where two men are reclining on kitchen chairs and then turns to look back at it.

  “Uncle Butch?” he calls out tentatively, and one of the men comes to the railing, watchful and on guard.

  “It’s me,” says Cedric. “It’s Lavar.”

  “Lavar! Damn, I didn’t recognize you,” says the man, waving on Cedric’s approach. “Come here, boy.”

  Cedric excitedly bounds up the porch steps and Butch—Barbara’s younger brother, a federal service worker who took over the house—surveys him in a toe-to-head sweep. “Boy, you got big. You’re like a man, now.”

  Cedric laughs, “I just wish I was wider, more filled out.” Butch, a trim, athletic-looking man a few inches shorter than Cedric, is wearing spandex tights with a racing stripe from a day of bicycling. He tells his nephew to “be patient, ‘cause it will come and you’ll end up being a good-sized man, definitely will.”

  The company of men is so novel for Cedric that this modest assurance lifts him.

  Butch introduces Cedric to his friend, a tall, light-skinned man in his early fifties, maybe, and wide and solid as a tree. “Howdoyado, young man,” Cornelius Leonard says, deferentially tapping the brim of his Washington Redskins cap before returning his attention to a Styrofoam cup filled with some sort of punch. Butch has a cup, too, sitting on the railing next to his expensive portable phone. Cedric spots a small bottle of vodka on a corner of the porch.

  “Yeah, that’s right, I heard there was a party for you tonight over at Chris’s,” Butch says, and Cedric is surprised, assuming that the crowd of absent uncles and missing fathers in his family wouldn’t have even been told about it. “Sorry,” says Butch awkwardly. “Sorry, and all, that I couldn’t make it.”

  As Butch talks, Cedric looks at the cluster of men, hanging out and chatting, jaunty and cool. It’s a whole unexplored society he’s about to leave behind.

  “So, you still doing good at school, Lavar?” Butch asks, beckoning Cedric’s attention.

  “Oh yea,” he says, “just about top in my class. And next year, I’m going to Brown University.”

  Butch squints, clearly having never heard of it, and Cedric helps him along. “It’s in Providence, Rhode Island …. It’s Ivy League and all.”

  This elicits a meaningful harummph from Cornelius, who talks for a moment about how he once was about to go to college—on a football scholarship—“but things went real sour, real fast,” he says. He ended up spending a couple decades in prison instead.

  Cedric nods solemnly at this—an appropriate response, he hopes—and Cornelius asks Cedric where he went to high school.

  “Ballou,” he says, trying to make it sound esteemed. “Frank W. Ballou Senior High School.”

  Cornelius chuckles, thinking it’s a joke. “Come on, now, I know Ballou,” he says. “Some guys in the joint came from Ballou, and I have a cousin who’s a teacher there. Ballou’s no place for students.”

  “He’s right about that,” Butch follows up, taking a swig of his punch.

  “It’s just no place,” echoes Cornelius, pulling down on the brim of his cap as he glances toward the street. “Just noooo place.”

  Standing between them, looking one way and then the other, Cedric begins to laugh, and they do, too, and then he’s laughing too hard and tries to stop but can’t. When he finally quiets, both men are staring at him with wary, glazed smiles, and Cedric Jennings knows, at long last, that the time has come for him to leave this place behind.

  7

  GOOD-BYE to YESTERDAY

  Lavar? Time’s up!” Barbara Jennings shouts as she pushes open the apartment door, back from her fourth trip up the three flights from the parking lot. “We’ve got to go! You hear?”

  No response. She stomps back to the bedroom and sees that Cedric’s head is under the bed. “I can’t find it. It’s nowhere … ” comes a muffled voice from under the mattress. “I just can’t go without my calculator. It’s got a graphing function and everything.”

  The long-awaited journey is at hand. Sometime today—a sunny, white-hot Tuesday at the end of August—Barbara will drive her son to what she imagines is the cool, green north: Providence, Rhode Island. At least, that’s the plan.

  “Did you hear me, Lavar?” she says, not really angry.

  “Yeah, Ma,” he says, rising from his knees. “I guess, yeah, okay …. I’ll get a new calculator up there.”

  Barbara, a sweating tempest with hands on hips, looks around Cedric’s room, just now noticing the change. The room, always a mess, at least used to have his presence as its warm center. Now all that’s left are empty shelves to oversee a mess of items that didn’t make the cut.

  Barbara is not feeling sentimental. Early this morning, while Cedric was still asleep (having spent a late night prowling a favorite mall with LaTisha), she thought about other parents of the college bound, her new peers, who, she figures, are probably packing up their cars t
oday in the suburbs. They can be all mushy about their children leaving some happy place where they were raised, a house, she imagines, with a garage, lots of bedrooms, and a lawn. This apartment, though, has not been a site of very many sweet memories. And without them, all that remains is raw, off-to-college tension. She can’t wait to get out of here, so she hauled most of the load down to the parking lot by herself.

  Cedric, having finally made it as far as the living room, loads up a last shopping bag with a favorite calculus book, his white Nikes, a huge blue Nivea skin cream bottle (to keep his skin from getting “ashy”), and the Brown University course catalogue. He hands the bag to his mother so he can pick up the Sony Trinitron from the floor. “This was my social life, my date every Friday night,” he says wryly, holding the tube, “so she coming with me.”

  “Fine. You ready?” Barbara asks curtly as they both slip past the plastic “Lord, Help Me to Realize That Nothing Can Happen Today You and I Can’t Handle” wall hanging in the front foyer. Without looking up or looking back, she triple locks the door.

  In the parking lot, these last items are squeezed into a white 1995 Dodge Caravan. She steps back a moment, surveys the tightly packed van, and exhales theatrically. Thinking back on the past few days of panicked preparations, she can hardly believe she has made it this far.

  With her lone credit card at its limit, she had to withdraw cash for the trip and has been nervous for days about carrying around so much money. If she got ripped off, she fretted, Lavar simply doesn’t go to college. Not wanting to spend money on long-distance calls to check on hotels in Providence, she went with what she knew—1-800-HOLIDAY—committing to a budget-straining rate of $96 a night at the Holiday Inn in downtown Providence.

  Yesterday, at Thrifty Car Rental in downtown D.C., she felt like she was walking a tightrope. She pulled out $232 in cash and her Visa. “Are you going to put anything on this Visa?” she asked the clerk, barely able to breathe, knowing that an affirmative response could prohibit the entire trip.

  “No, it’s just in case, just to secure it,” he said, and Barbara felt reborn moments later as she slipped behind the wheel of the van.

  Now she runs her hand along the grooves of the sliding side door, slams it, and tells Cedric to get into the front passenger seat.

  In a moment, they’re turning off V Street, catching the highway that crosses the Anacostia River and circles past the Capitol dome. The volleyball courts and softball diamonds near the Washington Monument are a parched savanna, and paddle boats are docked, lifelessly, on the glassy tidal basin. As the van passes behind the Lincoln Memorial, Barbara—feeling much but saying little—is easy prey for Cedric. “I don’t know when I’m coming back,” he starts.

  Acutely aware of everything today, Barbara is ready: “Well, I told Bishop about Thanksgiving break, and he said he’s going to send the money up for the trip, to make sure you come home.”

  “I can’t be coming home for everything. Christmas either.”

  Barbara looks over at him in exasperation. “Well, I’m not making any big Christmas this year. I’ll be going to Bishop’s house, so that’ll be that.”

  “Fine,” Cedric says, knocked backward a step and looking to parry from a new direction. “I won’t be calling for a while either.”

  “You will too, you’ll be calling all the time.”

  “Why would I want to call?” he says, his eyebrows raised. “I’ll be busy.”

  And around they go, working the wound until Barbara makes a move to cauterize it: “Either way, I’m coming for parents’ weekend in October.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m a parent, it’s my right!” she snaps, ushering in a period of silence. They turn from Washington’s beltway onto Interstate 95, the road that will lead, seven hours later, into downtown Providence.

  They’ve been on trips before, but this is different. Because one of them won’t be returning, the distance they travel is a span that will soon stand between them. Barbara feels each mile and, as the hours pass, reminisces about her life, while Cedric, nervously cracking sunflower shells, has his eyes fixed ahead.

  After a quick dinner stop, Cedric’s tenseness succumbs to a long nap. When he awakes, just before midnight, Barbara tells him that they’re just a few miles from Providence. She looks over at him and wants to tell him that there’s nothing to worry about, that everything’s going to be fine, but she’s not sure how to put it without making him defensive.

  Some notion seems to strike him, and he starts rooting through a bag of cassette tapes that he brought. In a moment, Rev. James Moore and the Mississippi Mass Choir is backing up the stunning LaShun Pace, one of Cedric’s favorites, as she belts out “Shelter from the Storm,” a gospel standard. He cranks it. The van rocks. They put the windows down. It’s what has taken them this far, Barbara muses—through apprehension, doubt, even fear. Just crank up the gospel. “I’ll be there for you … ” Cedric sings loudly, and Barbara, guiding the van into downtown Providence, sings along.

  The next morning blooms into a radiant, cloudless day, as it ought to be. Freshmen arrive for orientation, ferried by a grand procession of proud parents.

  Barbara, tired from the drive, gets a late start and, before long, the day feels harried. It’s nearly noon by the time they get to College Hill, a steep slope on top of which Brown sits like a cloud city above the gritty ethnic enclaves, Italian restaurants, and aging factories of Providence.

  “I wanted to get this all done early. Now look,” she says, sitting in the van near the Brown student union as Cedric, looking at a checklist in his orientation packet, slips out to go get his temporary student ID. “Don’t be all day, Lavar,” she calls after him, all business, “I gotta get back home.”

  Cedric has drawn a desirable dorm, Andrews Hall. It’s a three-story brick horseshoe on the quieter Pembroke side of campus that was renovated over the summer and now boasts fresh carpeting and new paint. From the Andrews parking lot, they unload the van swiftly, with Cedric helping on this end. While Barbara glances tersely at other parents—mostly white, of course—unloading Lexuses and Range Rovers and Volvo wagons, she notices that Cedric seems to be increasingly relaxed—smiling at some of the other incoming freshmen and offering unsolicited greetings.

  “These dorms are nice,” Barbara notes over her shoulder to Cedric, who is dragging a trunk full of linens behind her across the second-floor hallway carpet. Remembering Cedric’s complaints about last summer’s dorms, she adds, “And a lot nicer than MIT, ain’t it?”

  “Lot nicer,” he says, almost shouting. “This place is nothing like MIT.”

  A small paper square taped to the door of room 216 says “Cedric Lavar Jennings and Robert Burton.” Cedric fumbles with the key and opens the heavy wooden door.

  “Wow,” he says.

  “Hmmm, very nice,” Barbara confirms.

  His roommate, Rob, has already been here, settled in and gone. Barbara moves to the empty bed and starts unpacking while Cedric goes back downstairs for the rest. She carefully places a dozen new pairs of underwear, a dozen new pairs of socks, and six new T-shirts (clothes bought with money she didn’t have to spare) onto closet shelves, and she begins a ritual that she figures is being repeated at this moment in hundreds of rooms across the campus: a mother making her child’s bed for the last time. It’s not like Barbara made his bed back home, she muses, but it doesn’t matter. She made a thousand beds before she was twenty, and now she meticulously presses flat a fold of sheet, tucking it tight. Cedric returns, carrying his CDs, and crosses the room to check the unfamiliar titles in Rob’s collection as Barbara lays the blanket and smoothes it.

  With the van unpacked and their stomachs growling, Barbara decides they should walk to one of the dining halls for lunch. Soon, she and Cedric are strolling the campus, through archways and across neatly edged rectangles of thick grass.

  While Barbara is delighted that Cedric, so tightly wound yesterday, is now buoyantly bouncing as he walks,
an unwanted self-consciousness is welling up inside her. She’d rather not notice the cars other parents are driving, the clothes they’re wearing, and the ease with which they move. She knows, of course, that the typical Brown parents probably went to college and on to some professional status that their offspring, by virtue of this Ivy League acceptance, are now bounding toward. Here, it’s a day for her to be proud, but she can’t help staring at them—these smiling, polished people—and overhearing their jaunty melody of generational succession: a child’s footsteps following their own, steps on a path that leads to prosperity’s table and a saved seat right next to Mom and Dad.

  Barbara, watching Cedric demolish a ham sandwich at the dining hall, tries to figure out what she brings to this place, where she fits. It’s her day, too, she resolves, looking across a dining hall filled with effusive, chatty parents and freshmen, though her song is flat and elemental—an old, familiar harmony, really, about sacrifice and denial and a child venturing where the parent never could.

  “Really is a whole ’nother world up here,” she says quietly across the table as Cedric reaches for her untouched sandwich, barely noticing that she’s there. In that instant, she realizes how afraid she is that she might lose him.

  It’s almost two o’clock when they head back to the dorm. Near the new, soaring brick medical school, Cedric spots a bumper sticker on a parked car: “Your Honor Student Was Beaten Up By My Kid” it says, a play on the honor student bumper stickers that are especially popular in the inner cities.

  “That car must be from D.C.,” he jokes, and Barbara puts her arm around him as they laugh.

  A tall, thin Caucasian girl with hazel-blue eyes, a row of earrings, and a shaved head strolls by. “Isn’t that awful,” Barbara murmurs to Cedric after the girl passes. “Must be chemotherapy.” He nods sympathetically.