A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  “Yo, C,” he says. “’Bout time you dropped by.”

  “Oh, hey Zayd,” says Cedric, who has had a few brief hallway encounters with the tall blond. But his attention is elsewhere, at what must be the largest CD tower in the unit. It’s John’s three-hundred-CD monstrosity of spinning shelves, a tower that the two roommates share, standing like a lighthouse above the mess. Cedric is drawn to it, amazed.

  “That’s quite a CD collection. Wow,” Cedric says. “Just look at it.”

  “They’re mostly John’s CDs,” says Zayd.

  “But the ones Cedric’s admiring are yours,” says John.

  Cedric spots plenty of familiar music. Hip-hop artists, rappers, soul, rhythm and blues. “You got ‘Ready to Die,’ by Biggie Smalls? I mean, you know, a white guy with this stuff?”

  “Yeah,” says Zayd, “I think he’s great.”

  For the first time, Cedric’s stark notions about white America are blurred. He looks at Zayd, back at some other titles, and then at Zayd again. Yup, still white.

  Then it’s like there’s no one else around and the two of them are just talking, real easy and natural, about hip-hop artists they like and lyrics that really hit home. Zayd is not only informed and interested, he actually defers to Cedric’s knowledge.

  “You know, Biggie is married to Faith,” Cedric says, mentioning the female R&B artist Faith Evans and plucking one of her CDs off the tower.

  “What? Really?” says Zayd.

  “Yeah,” says Cedric, offering up some choice morsels. “They sometimes refer to each other in the music. Oh, it’s a whole thing.”

  “For real?” says Zayd, adding a touch of street to his voice.

  And Cedric grins, “Fo’ reeeeeal.”

  Later that night, lying in bed, Cedric is still sort of smiling to himself. If he is a hopeful kid by nature, it may be because in his darkest moments some glimmer of light has often appeared. He’s not certain—not yet—but he thinks he may have found his first friend at Brown.

  In the darkness, he tried to think back across the previous few weeks to any brief encounters he’s had with this Zayd—from Chicago, Cedric thinks—trying to fill the outline with some more color.

  One moment comes into focus. It was the very first week of school, when everything was loose and open, before cliques started forming. He was standing in the hallway with Kim Sherman, the artistic girl from Tennessee, and Zayd. They were right near the door of Mimi Yang, the senior psychology major who is the unit’s peer counselor, looking at an envelope taped to her door that was overflowing with condoms and latex gloves, a sort of low-rent safe sex dispenser.

  “What’s that glove for?” Cedric asked.

  “It’s for fisting,” Kim said, and told him how homosexuals sometimes use their fist for anal sex and that it can transmit the HIV virus.

  “Yeah, right, fisting,” said Zayd. And then to Cedric, “You never heard of fisting?”

  “Naw. Gaaawd. It’s gross. I mean, it’s worse than oral sex,” said Cedric, venturing to the limits of his sexual knowledge.

  “What’s wrong with giving a woman oral sex?” asked Zayd.

  Kim added, “Listen, Cedric, just about every guy tries that.”

  “Not where I’m from. Black guys don’t do that, except crack heads or something. Why would you want to be down there?”

  Kim giggled and looked over at Zayd, whom she kind of likes.

  “Oral sex is my forte,” he said, as Cedric stared at him, astonished by his candor. Zayd shrugged. “Hey, I’ll try anything.”

  Yes, Cedric remembers it all clearly. What kind of person lives by such a credo? This college sure is one strange place, Cedric laughs to himself. Zayd? What kind of a name is Zayd?

  Chiniqua Milligan rushes into the reading room of Brown’s sprawling modernist Rockefeller Library, searching for a familiar face. Across a carrier deck of linoleum, she spots the group of boys chuckling at a table tucked between the towering periodical racks. She speed walks across the room. “Sorry I’m late—can’t believe all you are still here,” she says, huffing.

  The male quartet from Wheelock’s class—Cedric, two other black students, and a student from Japan—is delighted. Cedric jumps up, “’Bout time you made it,” he says, smiling, and helps her with her chair as the other boys look her up and down, real quick.

  It’s the first meeting of the Richard Wright study group. Tonight’s task is to plan a class discussion on Native Son—a discussion this group will lead next class—but little was accomplished by the guys in the hour before Chiniqua’s arrival.

  Once she settles into her chair at the reading room table, work commences quickly. Questions are listed, and one of the black guys says he’ll type them up and print out copies. In a few minutes, everyone is dispersed.

  Outside the library, on one of the first cool evenings of autumn, Chiniqua and Cedric begin the long walk back to the dorm. As the only two black freshmen in Unit 15, it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to size each other up pretty well over the past month.

  Cedric, who has been looking futilely since he arrived for someone fitting his profile, sometimes jokes—when he and Chiniqua bump into each other and no one else is around—that she’s a “ghetto girl in disguise.” She laughs politely at this. But Chiniqua Milligan is actually more of a paradigm of what’s possible in urban education when commitment is matched with real money. Her father is a bus driver, and her mother is a teacher’s aide. Chiniqua and her sister were raised in an apartment in a black working-class neighborhood of upper Manhattan called Inwood, forty blocks north of Harlem. As a studious sixth grader, Chiniqua was pulled out of line and offered a stunning gift. She entered Prep for Prep, a much hailed Manhattan-based program that identifies promising black and Hispanic sixth graders from the New York City public schools. It offers them tutoring on one weeknight and on Saturdays and then places them into the city’s top private schools as seventh graders. Cedric has already bumped into a few Prep for Preppers at Brown and is certain he’ll meet more. He’s heard they’re all over this campus.

  For them, Brown doesn’t have to offer affirmative action. It’s already been handled, long ago. Chiniqua, who scored an 1100 on her SATs, received years of counseling—both academic and social—to assist with the collision of cultures she ingested each day crossing fifty blocks of Manhattan.

  She rose through the exclusive Columbia Prep, a cocoon for the children of Wall Street chieftains and assorted celebrities, including Woody and Mia, Robert DeNiro, and Bill Cosby. She beat out nearly everyone, graduating third in her class. At Brown, she’s thriving in a tough pre-med program and manages a heavy schedule of classes.

  The O.J. Simpson acquittal was yesterday afternoon, and the university is embroiled in racial discussion, though not between the races. It’s all intramural, as it is throughout much of the country, with whites moaning to whites as they feel the bite—in many cases for the first time—of being clobbered in what escalated into a racial contest. And many blacks, so accustomed to being routed by whites, feel a swell of jumbled, out-of-context pride.

  Chiniqua feels some of that pride and senses that Cedric must, too. Out of all the kids in the unit, however, they can discuss such sensitive racial sensations only with each other. “So what’d’jou think?” Cedric asks. “Him getting off. You think he’s innocent?”

  “All I know is that it’s over and a lot of people I spent the last couple hours with are crazy angry—though they won’t say nothing around me.”

  Tonight was Brown’s traditional response to the divisive national or campus issues: a mandatory “outreach” meeting held in all the freshman dorms. Chiniqua tells him that’s why she was late to the library.

  “Oh yeah, the race outreach,” Cedric says sheepishly. “I just didn’t go. I just decided I wasn’t.”

  “Well, I went,” she says with a how-could-you look. “I was the ONLY one there.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “No, just like always. All of
them just talking. No one says anything. Everything’s fine, everything’s good. He’s acquitted, so what. It’s nothing special …. We is all saints here, anyway.

  “Only about half the unit showed up, even though it was supposed to be mandatory,” she continues, moving easily between black-speak and flawless diction in her usual speedy canter. “Some other people were there, some facilitators, and we did these exercises. They asked us questions, like, when we were kids, were our dolls of many colors, or all one, you know in terms of their skin tone. And you stand up if yours was a certain kind of doll … people didn’t know what to do.”

  They walk for a while in silence. Cedric looks over at her, catching a glimpse of the side of her face, with its high cheekbones and large, dark eyes. She’s compact, about five-foot-six, with a lean figure that’s adorned artfully in a short leather skirt and turtleneck, wide belt, and midcalf boots. She knows he’s looking and likes it, looking forward at nothing and looking good.

  “Oh yeah,” she says, remembering one other thing. “I told the facilitators I had to leave early, that I had this other meeting. They were so deflated. It was like the whole thing was going to collapse with no black person to look at.” She laughs lightly at this, reconciled over years to often being the lone black in any room.

  Chiniqua is sophisticated—for better or worse—in ways that she knows Cedric is not. Close contact with whites is no novelty for her. She’s been a passing friend and fierce competitor of white kids for years. She knows some are nice, some are not—just like blacks—and they’re no more gifted or graced. It was she, after all, who wrecked the grading curves in high school. White kids? There’s a lot about her that they can never, ever understand and not much hope of any breakthroughs anytime soon.

  Like a lot of black and Hispanic kids who come here from integrated settings, she finds herself already drifting toward her designated racial enclave. Much like the assimilated Jewish kids drawn to orthodox Sabbath services at Hillel House, Brown offers Chiniqua—who was reluctant to attend militant black rallies in Harlem or troll clubs on 125th Street—a sterling opportunity to reestablish her racial bona fides and validate her blackness. Safely inside these gates, she can now pick up a dose of black culture pasteurized by ambition, whether it’s a tweedy, just tenured black professor talking about radicalism at a coffee klatch or fellow black achievers partying hard this week because next week is already blocked out for studying.

  In the past two weekends, she’s been going over to dorm room parties at Harambee House, Brown’s lone black dorm, and has tried to lure Cedric over. They’ve definitely become friends. He’s a little awkward, she thinks, but kind of nice and not bad looking. It could develop into more. But he’s hard to size up. A few weeks ago, he said something about having spent his whole life with blacks and wanting to see if there’s a place for him among nonblacks.

  “So you coming with me this weekend to Harambee?” Chiniqua asks, managing to make it sound casual. “Just people hanging around, you know, like us …. It must get mighty lonely just being by yourself so much.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Cedric says as they get off the elevator at the second floor—he breaking away toward his room; she, toward hers. “I’ll be fine. Really, I will.”

  She knows he’s lying, so she makes sure the invitation is left standing.

  “Well, maybe some other time.”

  Cedric takes the other path a few nights later, when he ventures out of his lair and finds himself a racial stranger in many rooms. Mostly they’re dorm rooms on the second floor of Andrews, where freshmen, here like elsewhere, spend an unfathomable number of hours sitting on their beds—heads against the wall or propped pillows—semistudying or not, listening to music, catching a little TV, sending off e-mail messages while flipping through yesterday’s student newspaper and talking about “you know, nothing,” which means everything. Just plain being is pretty damn interesting in these first few months of stay-up-as-late-as-you-want independence.

  John and Zayd’s room, with the unit’s top CD collection, is a favored place to hang, and there’s often a crowd inside. When Zayd’s there, Cedric feels comfortable dropping by, so he frequently takes a route that passes by the room on his way in and out of the dorm after dinner.

  One evening in mid-October he sees Zayd combing his short, dirty-blond hair in the mirror near his open door. They’ve seen each other a few times in the past couple of weeks, walking back from classes in the late afternoon or catching a midnight slice of pizza at the Gate.

  “Hey, it’s been a couple of days. What’s up?” asks Zayd, and soon the two are sitting on Zayd’s bed, some Boyz II Men on the CD, and Cedric is filling the room with his talk.

  For Cedric, each encounter with Zayd is an opportunity. As a trustworthy white peer—Cedric’s first—Zayd is a sounding board for questions and comments that Cedric has harbored for years, notions about white America that reverberate endlessly in the echo chamber of Southeast.

  “So, do you think the cops framed O.J.?” Cedric says, prodding.

  Zayd, who by inclination and rearing is sympathetic toward the so-called oppressed, nods along but is reserved. “Do cops frame black suspects? Absolutely, all the time. Did they frame O.J.? I think there’s just too much evidence to fabricate. I think, though, that O.J. was helped by all the black guys who’ve been framed for all the years.”

  Cedric nods at this judicious response and wants to know Zayd’s thoughts on other black martyrs. Midway through his list, John wanders in. By then, Cedric has made it to Marion Barry, whom he says “was completely framed by white cops.” John jumps in with the standard white counterresponse, “Look, he did it. Right? He was smoking the crack in the room with the girl. Doesn’t matter if he was targeted or not.”

  “But, like, that’s the point,” says Cedric. “He was a suspect from the first day he became mayor, ‘cause he’s black. A black is a suspect, no matter who he is. And eventually they got him.”

  Zayd nods at this. “Yeah, definitely, blacks are racial suspects and that skews the equation.”

  Around they go, hashing it out in this freshly painted, drywalled holding pen, with its little mirror and sink, where kids hashed things out last year and will again next year and the year after. It’s just that this year an exotic bird is among them, an authentic ghetto kid who, for whatever reason, made it through the urban inferno without donning an armor. Cedric can take his off. Once he finally starts talking, he’s open and transparent.

  He’s a draw. The room usually fills when Cedric is around and, soon, Ira Volker is here, along with Florian Keil, his soft-spoken German roommate whose father runs a Boston arm of the Goethe Institute, the German government’s cultural ministry abroad.

  Neither says too much. But as they listen to Cedric’s speech—his black urban expressions, sometimes wrapped around an inappropriate infinitive verb or dropped suffix—a little street creeps into all their voices, part accommodation, part unconscious imitation. Cedric, whose ear is sensitive to such inflections, is not sure if he should be flattered or offended.

  Without offering much about himself, Cedric senses their ardor to make him part of the group. His blackness and his standoffishness, his unwillingness to party with them, seems to make everyone worry that there’s an unspoken racial subtext: that he doesn’t like them because they’re white or something. Cedric knows everyone will feel better once he shows that he likes everyone else, proving that goodwill at Brown crosses racial lines. This bothers Cedric, and yet the desire to make himself belong actually intensifies as word spreads of the disputes with Rob. Well-intentioned fellow unit members try to intervene. A few nights after the racial discussions in Zayd’s room, Zeina Mobassaleh gets Cedric alone in his room and makes a plea for reconciliation. “Cedric, why don’t you and Rob just talk it out. Rob is really a nice guy. The problem is communication.”

  “Zeina, look, he and I are just so different, and us being across the room from each other, there’s gonna be bad stuff,
” Cedric responds, shutting off her efforts.

  Cedric doesn’t want to get into the nuances of the conflict, but the situation is clearly souring with each day. His fatigue from acting as Rob’s social secretary causes some mishaps, albeit unintentional. One night he forgets to pass on a phone message and Rob is understandably upset about it. Cedric, knowing he screwed up, manages to apologize.

  Then it happens again. Someone called about not being able to meet Rob for a chemistry study session. Cedric took the message but then forgot to pass it on. A few hours later, while Cedric is reading his education textbook in the lounge, Rob storms in. He stood outside the chemistry building for an hour, waiting for his study partner. Eventually, he got the guy on the phone and felt like an idiot.

  “You didn’t give me the message, and it screwed up my whole night. I was standing out there for an hour,” says Rob, barely suppressing a shout. “I mean, are you doing it on purpose?!”

  “No, look, I was wrong,” Cedric says, regretful. “Really, I’m sorry.”

  But Rob keeps going. He points his finger at Cedric and glares, hard-eyed. “Don’t let it happen again.” He stomps out of the lounge and back to the room.

  Maybe Rob would have said the same thing had his roommate been white or Asian or Hispanic. But Cedric can’t be sure of that. He sees condescension. He sees effrontery. He sees things that blacks see and maybe whites don’t. A second later, he’s rushing back to the room on Rob’s heels.

  The two of them square off in the middle of their room. “Don’t you talk to me like I’m a child or something,” Cedric shouts. “Talking to me like I’m less than you, like you have no respect for me. You don’t know me, so don’t speak to me like that.”

  “You don’t know me, either,” counters Rob, not practiced at confrontation the way Cedric is. “Listen, you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

  “All I know is that if you talk to me that way again, I’m gonna fuck you up. I’ll kick your ass.”