by Ron Suskind
He walks across the cluttered room and slumps onto the white couch in the empty apartment, Barbara having already left for work. It hasn’t been such a terrific three days since he arrived home for Christmas break, but he has sort of been looking forward to today’s return to Ballou. Just before graduation last year, Ballou’s librarian, Marilyn Green, asked if he would be there and if he’d be willing to speak. He said he would. And during those dark lonely days of the fall, when he often felt friendless, having committed to a date gently provided a counterpoint to his flagging confidence. He would have to face them all if he had to drop out of Brown by then. Through November, he’d sometimes see his old teachers sitting in the library, like they were waiting for him, counting on him. And it would summon something in him—not pride, exactly, more like self-preservation.
Cedric indulges in a long shower this morning, thinking over his speech. He needs to be upbeat but realistic, he thinks, and, with so many things he wants to say, he has to be careful not to ramble. He decides that in talking to his audience—seniors thinking about college—he needs to try to be absolutely truthful about what it’s really like to be in a big college, far from Southeast. He owes them that.
Such candor hasn’t been easy in his first few days home. Two hours after the night sleeper from Providence arrived on Sunday morning, Cedric was already in church, with Barbara beaming and a hundred pairs of eyes on him.
He never did get around to calling Bishop Long after parents’ weekend, so the pastor had a little surprise in store: he called Cedric and another college freshman onto the stage to ask them a few pointed questions—things he knew the congregation would want to know.
“As Cedric’s spiritual godfather,” Long said, jauntily holding the hand mike like a talk-show host, “I’m obligated to ask how things are going at Brown University.”
Cedric paused. He had thought about this on the train ride. He knew people would ask, and he knew they’d need an answer that wouldn’t leave them confused and deflated. On his way to a good, concise answer, he took a few logical detours: (1) even taking everything pass/fail, he knew that his grade in Calculus would have been an A, and (2) in his other classes, he simply doesn’t know what his grades would be. With the benefit of such forethought, his response on stage was clarion clear: “I have a 4.0 average.”
“A four point oooooh!” screamed Bishop Long, turning to the flock and waving his free hand as they rose in a standing ovation.
Once the clapping died down, he moved to the other key issue. “So, Cedric, have you found another church up there?”
“No, sir, ummm, there aren’t many churches up in Providence … ”
“Not many churches?” said Long, casting a skeptical look. Relieved to be past the grade-point issue, Cedric proved to be as light-footed as a politician on the stump. “I just know there’s no way I could ever replace Scripture Cathedral.”
Long snapped his head toward the audience with a “that’s-my-boy” grin, showing his delight and compelling thunderous applause.
Just shy of 10 A.M., Cedric walks through the metal detector at Ballou’s front door (a new addition this year) and into the school’s front foyer. It’s empty because of the late opening, giving him a chance to quickly check which teachers might be around. He glances at the wall clock and sprints down to the math wing, first floor.
“Ms. Nelson, it’s me,” he whispers, ducking his head in the first-floor classroom.
“Oh, Cedric, you made it,” she says, and she hugs him.
A moment later, he’s at the room of Ms. Wingfield, his ninth-grade math instructor and homeroom teacher for four years.
“I got your letters,” she says as soon as she sees him striding in, all aglow.
“Got yours, too,” he smiles back. “That was a nice card.”
“So, how did it go?” she asks.
“I’m doing good, 4.0,” he testifies, feeling less guilt saying it than he expected.
“Oh, come on,” she says.
But he doesn’t flinch. Walking these hallways, the performance pressure is, if anything, rising. He can’t back down now. “The good are delivered,” he says to her, slightly under his breath. “Yes, the good are delivered.”
In an empty, unused annex of the library, teachers have already gathered around a cafeteria table with a coffee urn, juice bottles on ice in a large plastic punch bowl, and a few plates of donuts and muffins.
Cedric feels awkward walking in, clumsy and outsized, not sure, suddenly, how he’s supposed to sound when he talks to them all. He grabs an orange juice and hovers close to the table, making small talk.
“Someday, you know, I’m coming back to be the principal of Ballou,” he says to a couple of teachers with whom he’s been chatting. “After, of course, I become a software designer and make my fortune.”
They both smile at him, warm, sad, soft smiles, making him suddenly feel boastful and transparent, and he finds his self-confidence rapidly eroding as everyone moves into seats.
Alumni Day, as much as anything at Ballou, is an act of imagination. The icy day notwithstanding, the turnout is bleak, as it has been for years, with ten or so seniors, half a dozen returning graduates, and maybe twenty teachers.
Dr. Jones, having traded in last year’s starched white shirts and colorburst ties for a black turtleneck, stands at the plug-in, desktop podium. Cedric already heard from Ms. Wingfield that the violence and mayhem at Ballou have been rising steadily, and Dr. Jones looks weary. Any optimism he had during his first year as Ballou’s principal seems to have vanished in his second.
“Ms. Green has been planning for this day almost the whole year now,” he says, looking slightly stricken as he gazes at the small gathering. “We look forward to you, alumni, coming back, an effort for you to have a continuity, a continuum, for you to help someone else who’s been in your place and knows what it’s like to go to Ballou.” He pauses, looking down momentarily at his fingers curled around the podium’s edges—like a fighter asking his arms to decide whether it’s worth getting up off the canvas.
He straightens them and swiftly wraps it up: “Because I want those young people who are still here to see the success that you, the alumni, have had … and know that they can do that, too. So, right, you can dream and you can fulfill your dreams … okay … good morning and have fun.”
Cedric watches it all, feeling disembodied. Slumped in his chair with arms folded, long legs stretched out, and ankles crossed, he gazes around the room, noticing how small this library is (hell, Jefferson’s was bigger), how few graduates showed up, and how the teachers, mostly standing along the spotty shelves of books, don’t dress nearly as well as the professors at Brown. He sees James Davis, in a wrinkled green army jacket, slip into the back of the room looking grim. He feels an urge for the two of them to get out of there and talk about old times.
The first student speaker, a girl he barely knows who graduated in 1993 and goes to Howard University, starts off predictably, talking about how she was fourth in her class at Ballou but was overwhelmed as a Howard freshman, practically failing most of her courses until she discovered Jesus … “and He became my study partner.”
She launches into a stunning testimony of how “Jesus taught me when to study, taught me how to study, taught me what to study, told me exactly what was on every test,” and boosted her average to nearly 4.0. “I just got one B in French, and that was my fault.”
When she cites Jesus as the source of her federal educational grants, Cedric starts to chuckle, shaking his head. He attributes everything to Jesus, too, but federal loans? If only it were that simple, he muses, as Ms. Green returns to the podium and his moment approaches. Then he’s up front, tapping the mike. He tells them his name, that he’s triple majoring in math, computer science, and education, and that he wants to talk about “practical things.”
He crests through some of his going-it-alone, against-the-odds mottos, like listening to yourself, to your own heart, in deciding about colleg
e and not what other people (“some of whom are scared to do what you’re doing”) expect of you. Then he recounts how people warned him about going to a “big white university with lots of private school kids” and notes that he’s proven them wrong by being “very happy at Brown and very successful at Brown, with a four point average.”
As the clapping dies, he tells the seniors to take advantage of Ballou’s “contingency of great teachers who hold your hand because there’s nobody gonna be holding your hand when you get out there in the world. It’s hard to believe I’m saying this, considering what Ballou can be like, but, in some ways, this is a shelter for you, a protection against some of the real obstacles to achievement, some of which are real complicated. Once you get out there, you have to build your own protection.”
He pauses for a moment, realizing that these teachers and administrators must recall how he stood proud nine months ago and told them that “there’s nothing me and my God can’t handle.”
And it jars him. The memory of that line makes his chest ache, and he knows that his front is crumbling, that every word, now, is taking him further from that rallying cry.
“To really shoot for the stars,” he continues, unable to match the phrase with an upbeat tone, “you must fully accept the challenges of life—to face them honestly and head on—because life is not an easy road. It’s very hard ….” His voice catches on the last word. The library seems silent, a roomful of unblinking eyes. “You need to work hard, very hard,” he begins again, desperate just to finish. “And put your trust in the Lord and not man—because man will let you down—and then you can succeed in life.” He flees back to his seat before the brief applause ends.
After a few more short speeches, most teachers wave farewells and hurry back to class.
By now, the school day has started. Cedric notices James has already disappeared, and he wanders out into the halls, not sure what to do. He peers into a few classrooms, thinking that everything seems the same but weirdly far off, like he’s watching it on TV. On the first floor he walks past a cluster of boys who should be in class—they look sort of puny to him—and then he stops, reaching out to touch his first-floor locker. It’s someone else’s now, but he turns and leans his back against it and tries to sketch outlines of the previous owner, the angry boy who ran a gauntlet in these halls and preached at graduation. But he can’t. The only thing around him that stirs any remembrance is the thing that, back then, he struggled to overlook—the very ruin of the place, the fading light in teachers’ eyes, the bleakness all around. Maybe he didn’t notice it as much when he was here, or maybe it was the blight, closing in, that kept him running, and he saw it only in passing. Now he smells despair everywhere, and it makes his nostrils burn.
He rouses himself, pushing himself off the locker. Shake it off, he thinks, and he starts to walk again, this time more briskly, trying to affect the purposeful gait that wore down hush puppy soles on this linoleum. He figures he’ll run upstairs to check whether Mr. Taylor might be free.
But on the way to the second floor, he stops. There’s something red on the step. It’s dried and all, but you can tell. He’d heard that two girls got in a knife fight just a few days ago. Must have been here.
He stares at the blood for a long time, he’s not sure how long, until his mind goes blank. Then, Cedric Jennings, salutatorian, class of 1995, turns silently and descends the stairs, knowing only that there’s no need to ever come back to this place.
LaTisha Williams looks across the table at Cedric at a home-style restaurant seven blocks south of Scripture Cathedral. She sips her water and says, dreamily, that she still “feels real tingly” and he nods, but not with nearly the enthusiasm that she’d hoped for.
It’s January 22, and Cedric just took LaTisha to the Sunday afternoon service at Scripture. In the midst of whooping frenzy, LaTisha got the Holy Spirit.
Well, she may have, anyway. She herself isn’t exactly sure, so she decides to talk a little more about how it felt going up on stage and having Bishop Long strike her on the forehead. What’s indisputable is that she was up there five minutes or more, feeling faint, crying and waving her hands, sighing, “Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus,” over and over, while Long’s deputies held her up.
“All I know,” she says, “is it was such an amazing feeling.”
Cedric listens to her with an almost clinical detachment. “Generally speaking,” he notes, “when people get the Holy Spirit, their whole life changes, with them getting settled and feeling this kind of bliss all over—and it lasts a while, at least a day and usually a few days. I just remember from when it happened to me when I was thirteen.”
“Well, isn’t it different for everybody?” she says, suddenly feeling sour. “Isn’t it a personal thing?”
“Oh yeah, no doubt,” he says, giving a little ground. “Look, what I’m saying is that, clearly, something powerful happened to you up there—I’m just not sure if the Holy Spirit actually entered your body or not.”
A cheeseburger with fries is slid before her, a breaded catfish with salad before him, and she lets the issue of spiritual authenticity lie, at least for now. They quietly eat, saying little.
It’s a day of high hopes for LaTisha. She’d never been to Scripture before but long anticipated going. She knows the church is at the center of Cedric’s life and, in some ways, holds a key to his drive, to his sense of mission.
She found she missed him more than she expected when he left for college and, in the weeks between phone calls to Providence, often thought about why. Their bond, she decided, was both more and less than a traditional romance. While they were never officially dating, or each others’ “boo” (as she sometimes joked with him over the phone), he was, clearly, a focus of her life. She’d spent years uncovering his young, black, male minefields—the array of buried explosives so many boys at Ballou seemed to carry about issues of trust and respect, about achievement and toughness and manhood. And, in that often exhausting, day-to-day effort, she’d inadvertently invested her heart.
Between bites, LaTisha breaks the silence by asking what he’s been doing for the three weeks of winter break, why he didn’t call. He offers no explanation other than saying he’s been “just sitting around the apartment, watching videos” and that he’s been getting up early every weekday morning—about 5 A.M.—to watch a show on local cable where a math professor, standing at a blackboard, goes through a college-level calculus course.
Feeling like she might as well confide in him, she’s candid about her problems at UDC and how she’ll just take two classes next semester and start working. She already has something lined up in the mail room of United Communications, the newsletter company, right next to Phillip Atkins. “You know,” she says, trying to sound self-reliant, “I could use the money.”
He nods, like he’s sympathetic, but she’s sure she detects an appraising look, something she hasn’t seen from him before.
By the time dusk arrives, both are back at Scripture in metal folding chairs set up in long rows across the basement for a smallish prayer meeting of about eighty. Bishop Long, dressed casually in slacks and a yellow sport shirt, talks across a wide range of topics with animated enthusiasm, joking, telling stories, loosely quoting Scripture. He talks about how ladies, with “figures like Coke bottles, sometimes get dressed for church like they’re going to a show” and how people should look “presentable coming to church, if that’s within their power, but not be showy, trying to turn heads.”
LaTisha listens, arms folded, slumped in her chair. Cedric leaves for Brown tomorrow, and this day didn’t turn out quite like she’d hoped. Sure, at Scripture she felt a surge of something—a taste, at least, of the steady, spiritual energy she’s so long detected in Cedric. Thinking ahead, she decides that she’ll call Barbara in a few weeks and maybe come back here for another visit to church, this time with her.
As for her relationship with Cedric, this special day is rapidly feeling like a disappointment. She purses her li
ps, trying to assess matters: she knows she’s a big-hearted person, she knows she’s been there for him when no one else was—and would be again in a moment, if he’d let her.
She looks over as he listens raptly to Long, even though he told her on the way back from the restaurant that his enthusiasm for church and the unquestioned power of faith is slowly ebbing.
If he’s having some doubts, she mulls, maybe she could find her faith and help him. She decides she’ll pray for him, but the idea makes her remember how she used to pray at her old church that God would steer her to a boy, any boy, who would be her friend. She hadn’t thought about all that in more than a year, or the adjoining recollection: her prayer that Cedric was the one. And, as LaTisha’s mind wanders backward, her chin comes to rest against her breastbone’s high ridge, and her eyelids drift shut.
Almost an hour later, at 9:30, she feels a nudge from Cedric. The service is over. Time to get back home. She fights to rouse herself from a deep sleep, and they wander quietly toward the front of the church to catch a ride home with another congregant at tonight’s service.
LaTisha, sifting through a jumble of emotions and knowing their time is short, tries to quickly engage him, criticizing the last thing she heard Long say before she dozed. “I don’t agree,” she says, “that you always have to be looking your best at church, dressing up and all. Everybody, whether it’s a bum or whatever, should be welcome here—it’s the Christian way, it’s God’s will.”
They both slip into the car, ignoring the driver, as their discussion of this obscure point drifts into discord. As LaTisha turns from her front seat to continue the debate, Cedric fires from the back with zeal: “It’s not what he said, LaTisha! Bishop Long said you should look as good as you are able—without being provocative or flashy—because this, after all, is a house of God.”