by Ron Suskind
“Don’t worry, I hear what you’re saying and all,” she retorts, talking fast and feeling, at this instant, that she’s not to be trifled with. “My point is different. My point is simple. In the supposedly perfect world of the church, it shouldn’t matter how you look, or what you wear. If you’re fat or skinny or come wearing a Hefty bag. Look at Jesus, look what he wore, how he looked. If you’re a person of God, it just don’t matter!”
Cedric glares at her as the car snakes toward Southeast: “You don’t understand anything, LaTisha. He’s saying you take care of yourself. All right?!”
There’s no controlling it now. Both are screaming at each other, regret and anger gushing out, until desperation creeps into LaTisha’s shriek: “It don’t matter how you look, Cedric—it’s what’s inside, the spirit in you. That’s what matters, that’s what matters!”
But he’s yelling too—even louder—and suddenly she feels herself being overwhelmed by a ferocity she’s never seen in him: “Listen to me! He’s saying you don’t let yourself go! All right?! You make yourself look as good as you can! You hear me? What I’m telling you—you just don’t let yourself go!”
They fall silent, and she realizes that this shouting match has nothing to do with Bishop Long. It’s about the two of them, offering a glimpse at how Cedric must see her now. Sitting silently, exhausted from the screaming, she thinks back on that appraising look at dinner. Yes, it was cool and distant, a look of judgment, sizing her up as an overweight, clinging black girl with few prospects and regret growing like kudzu, stuck, maybe forever, in Southeast D.C. Which is, after all, what she is. But still, she hates that any of that matters, that those circumstances mean anything. Cedric used to know that they didn’t—none of them—back in the days he could look right inside of her and see all that was good. She glances at him in the rearview mirror and can make out the side of his face in the passing streetlights. He seems expressionless, gazing out the front window, unaffected. And, as the car twists toward Anacostia to take LaTisha home, she forces herself to recognize that Cedric Jennings really doesn’t live here anymore. He’s just passing through.
The auditorium is casually filling when Cedric arrives, a fresh notebook in hand, and glances down at his imitation DKNY wristwatch. Great, a few minutes early, he thinks. He flops into the aisle seat of a long, empty row of worn oak chairs, bolted onto the sloping concrete, and considers, with some astonishment, how happy he is to be back at Brown.
Being here makes him feel settled and curiously disconnected—like he’s very much on his own but now more comfortable with it. Looking back, the month at home was nothing like he’d expected. Sure, there was an initial, warm blast to the senses when he first returned in mid-December—the smell of air freshener in the bathroom, the taste of the fried chicken Barbara made on his second night back, the feel of his mattress, with dips and gullies in just the right places—but then it all felt too familiar, lending a dull tension to his drifting, uneventful days in the apartment. Infrequent outings—to church, mostly, and one small family gathering at his grandmother’s house—only ended up making him feel more obtuse, as people he’d sometimes known his whole life asked off-target, generally uninformed questions about his new life in Providence.
His new life in Providence? He considers the phrase and grunts a laugh that echoes faintly across the empty seats. He’s noticed a jocular, familial air to the hallways of East Andrews, a feeling (more relief than resignation) that this place, in some official way, has now become home for all of them. At least that’s the way it felt when everyone returned and began hugging and talking excitedly, laughing at nothing.
Cedric’s shoot-low curriculum, born of fear last fall, was a onetime deal. If nothing else, his fabrications at church and at school over his nonexistent grades confirmed what he’d already figured: he can’t take everything pass/fail ever again. This semester he’ll take higher level classes for grades. He also knows he won’t get the benefit of the doubt that many professors extend in the first few months of freshman year. This semester, he mulls during a last moment before his morning class starts, everything is about to “get real.”
Cedric squints to get a better take on the tiny, distant figure of professor Billy Wooten, just now adjusting the podium microphone. He eventually makes him out as a thoroughly average white, middle-aged guy of average height, with a conventionally professorial demeanor and an unremarkable lecturing style—all of it squeezed into a standard-issue tweed jacket.
“Welcome,” says the distant figure, “to Elementary Psychology, the introduction to mind and behavior.”
Cedric opens his notebook, pulls out a blank sheet of paper, and poises his pen as Professor Wooten describes what will transpire over the next fifteen weeks. It’s the fabled freshman survey course: a bread-and-butter staple of college. Though Tom James’s History of Education was a survey course, there were no tests; it was small enough that Professor James could take a special interest in Cedric, and, most important, it covered areas that allowed Cedric to indulge his passionate perspectives on race and education for credit.
Half an hour into today’s lecture, Cedric can already feel the difference. He’s written down a slew of loaded terms, from sensation to perception to interpersonal attraction. He glances over at the syllabus, just passed out. There are two multiple-choice midterms accounting for a big chunk of the grade and then a multiple-choice final. A once-a-week lab section will look at methodologies to study these mysterious terms. Lots and lots of terms. He looks up as Professor Wooten prepares to show some slides and instructs a teaching assistant to dim the lights. Sitting in the shadows, Cedric realizes that, in here, he’s faceless, just a number, like a walking, breathing SAT score in Nikes. Walking out into the late January sun a few minutes later, he makes a mental note to get that textbook—today!—and start reading it, cover to cover.
Going from class to class over the coming day, the semester’s lineup takes shape. In the Calculus 10 class, he scans the syllabus and sees some material he covered at MIT and plenty that he didn’t. The teacher is a wiry, awkward, fast-talking Ph.D. candidate named Peter Berman, an oddity among the mostly Asian grad students who teach this course. The class, though, is almost identical to last semester’s: a diverse crowd of mostly nonmath majors, many of whom are expecting to use this class toward a major in one of the sciences. Surveying the room, Cedric decides to display his mastery and answers a question about inverse trigonometric functions. He can feel the eyes of other kids sizing him up. It feels good, so he answers another. A few minutes later, his arm goes up to nail a third.
He knows he’s showing off, but it feels wonderful, a cooling salve to ease his fear of being revealed as academically unworthy. As Berman scribbles ahead toward logarithmic functions, Cedric wonders if he’s wrong to be so proud, and his mind slips back to something Long had said a few weeks ago in a Sunday sermon about the sin of pride, one of Bishop’s favorite subjects. “He that is of a proud heart stirreth up strife,” Cedric recalls Long commanding, quoting Proverbs 28:24, “but he that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat.” Where, he wonders for the umpteenth time, does using one’s talents to bring “glory onto God” end and the much maligned “pridefulness” begin? He hauls out the threadbare response he’s been dragging around for years: that everything you are comes from God, that He deserves credit for it all. Obviously. God created everybody, and all the black winners on the Oscars and Grammies and MTV awards are always thanking God for everything they’ve accomplished, like they’re not allowed to take any credit for themselves lest other blacks jump on them for being haughty. But if God created everyone, Cedric mulls, tapping his pencil eraser on the desktop, what ultimately differentiates the winners from the rest? Take the kids who made it to Brown. Some are people of faith, most are not. But, one thing he’s noticed: very few of them arrived by simply putting their trust in God and praying everything would work out. Took a lot more than that.
He looks up at the blackboard
, trying to focus on the equations and get his head back in the lesson. But it’s no use. Why is he so good at calculus? Because he worked long and hard to master the thoroughly earthbound puzzles of integration, slowly building a faith in his own abilities. And hadn’t that effort been driven, in so many ways, by a burning desire to have something—anything—for which he could be proud? Where’s the sin in that? Is he just bringing glory unto God with his God-given talents, or does it have nothing to do with God?
He rests his head in his hands and rubs his eyes. Too much to think about, too much to figure out. Spending so much time over the holiday in church, where everyone is ranked according to sacrifice and faith, and then returning to Brown, where everyone is ranked strictly by achievement, has sparked a real shock.
He thinks for a moment about his classes this semester. There will be the second half of his yearlong Spanish class—no big deal. But there’s this class—an education fieldwork seminar, where he’ll visit some school in the inner city of Providence, keep a journal, and write a couple of papers—that is sure to present its own distinct challenges. It will undoubtedly tap, for better or worse, into his own fiery experiences at Ballou on the axis of race and achievement.
Sitting in the opening session of another class he’s thinking of taking—Computer Science 22, Discrete Math—he spots one of Brown’s nerd-gods, an eager Asian kid who answered two questions in the last five minutes. And it suddenly dawns on him: at Ballou, that was Cedric. He was the one with the unshakable confidence, at least in the ordered realm of mathematics, the one, often the only one, who could always figure his way out of a jam—or at least give it one hell of a shot.
Then he came to Brown. Losing his pride last fall for those first cautious steps into a white world—dropping onto a lower academic track of beginner classes and pass/fail—didn’t work very well, he decides. At the time, he thought it would. He thought about pride being a sin, like Bishop says, and not being something that was central to his journey. If he just did the best he could to cross that lowered bar, he recalls thinking, he would still bring glory onto God and feel okay about himself. Or part of it might have just been sober common sense—maybe this was the only way to avoid crushing failure.
But, in the end, after the months of rewritten papers and late-night cramming, it felt sort of lousy. He left Tom James’s office in mid-December feeling exhausted, slightly soiled, and strangely unlike himself.
The key, he finally realizes, has always been pride. Over years, it had quietly knitted itself into his core. But, just like at church, it was sort of a sin in his neighborhood and at Ballou. Though he’d never actually use the word, kids must have sensed it in him when they always attacked him for “thinking he was better than everyone else.” He ended up building all those convoluted rationales for lofty ambition, saying he needed to go to a famous college, a place everyone had heard of, to justify all of his painful sacrifices. It’s all clear now: that was just a cover. It was pride—pure, simple, in-your-face, shining breastplate pride—that got him to this place. And, after making it this far, he’ll be damned if he’ll swallow it now.
He smiles, almost laughing, like he’s made a discovery. How could he have forgotten that? He looks across the room in this upper-level course and decides, then and there, that he’ll sign up for discrete math—and stick with all the other classes. That’ll give him five courses for the semester, one more than the per-semester requirement most students stick to.
After class ends he feels strengthened and purposeful, and he stops by the Brown bookstore to load up on textbooks and supplies. The campus seems festive as dinnertime approaches. With everyone back but little assigned work, it will certainly be a Thursday night of partying and reunion. He walks up Thayer Street lugging books, returning the smile of one passing kid from last semester’s calculus class, and then there’s the girl, whose name he doesn’t know, who smiles at him sometimes in the tray and silverware line at the VeeDub.
“Five classes,” he says to himself. “Have I lost my mind?” It actually feels kind of good to say it. He remembers what Miriam, Dr. Korb’s aunt, told him about how “saying things can sometimes make them happen.” Yes, this is a bold plan that won’t just draw him even with the other kids, with their measly four classes, but might take him a notch above. It’s an intrepid act—maybe his first since arriving here—that, somehow, seems to liberate him.
He turns the corner near a flower shop on the north end of Thayer and into a parking lot that edges into the shadow of Andrews dorm, his arms now straining with the bags of thick, fresh, unopened books.
He sees the dorm loom up ahead. Thinking about Zayd and Chiniqua, about Evan and even Rob, he begins to run. He can’t wait to tell them, in a casual, offhand way, of course, that this semester he’s taking five—count ’em, five—classes. So, take that, he thinks, bounding to the second floor two steps at a time.
The Gate reaches its blooming, buzzing peak by eleven on Thursday night—a prime-time, weekend’s-coming effusion of see-and-be-seen activity, fueled by overcooked roast beef on cardboard sub rolls, slices of barbecue chicken pizza, Cool Ranch Doritos, and up-half-the-night vats of fountain Coke.
Cedric assesses Zayd’s brown boots, crossed and resting on the mirror-topped table.
“You didn’t buy those boots until you saw mine,” he says.
“I didn’t?” replies Zayd, arching a brow. “All I know is I bought them ’cause I liked them.”
“No,” says Cedric emphatically. “You saw mine and said you didn’t like them, that they looked like a girl’s. Remember, we were over at the shoe place?”
Zayd shrugs, rotates his gaze around the room once, and then turns back. “Okay, so they grew on me.”
“Just don’t you make it sound like you thought of it yourself,” says Cedric. “It’s just important, you know, that we clear about what’s what.”
Zayd seems to ignore this, scratching a blotch of dirt off the edge of his raised sole, then offers a carefully tailored response: “I mean, Cedric, I respect your sense of style and, naturally, some of it’s gonna rub off on me. And some of mine, on you. I’m cool with that.”
Cedric blows on the tip of his barbecue chicken pizza slice, takes a bite, and throws Zayd a skeptical look. “You mean some of my authentic, been-in-the projects style is gonna rub off? Yeah … ,” he shakes his head in mock disgust, “ … right.”
Zayd lets it lie. He takes a swig of his designer juice—Nantucket Nectar’s Guava Passion—and then looks away. Cedric, sure he detects impatience, something he rarely sees in Zayd, eases off a little. “Well, all right,” he mumbles halfheartedly, “I guess you got worse projects there in Chicago than we do in D.C ….”
Zayd, swiftly attentive, meets him in the middle. “For sure,” he says eagerly. “You ever read that book, There Are No Children Here, about those two little black kids growing up in Henry Horner Houses in Chicago? That may be the worst housing project in the entire country.”
Cedric frowns. “What, your college professor dad get you to read that?”
“No,” replies Zayd, his voice oddly tentative, a puzzled look on his face. They’re both just looking at each other, and Cedric decides not to avert his gaze or fill the silence. A host of unwelcome and unfamiliar emotions seem to be welling inside him—he can’t quite make them out—and he roots about for another pitch, the last one not having worked very well. “Don’t give that affluent, white liberal stuff,” he says finally, stunned that a smug, cynical, college-boy line just passed his lips.
Zayd seems stunned, too, and their tension shatters into laughter.
It’s cold and wet outside. The Gate keeps filling, and no one’s going anywhere. Other kids from the unit stop by, fold themselves into the duo’s conversation, then alight at some other table, leaving Cedric with the one person everyone knows has managed to befriend him.
Along the way, the two of them settle into a discussion of music—the realm of hip-hop, rap, and R&B—the one address t
hey both seem to share. Just before dinner, Cedric bought the new CD by R. Kelly, the hip-hop star, with $12 he borrowed from Zayd, and Zayd asks if he’s listened to it yet. Cedric hasn’t, but they talk about R. Kelly anyway, and then about whether Zayd should get his chin pierced—Cedric is against, Zayd equivocal—and then about Chiniqua’s tight new braids, both agreeing that they look very, very good.
“What kind of hair do you think looks best on a black girl?” Zayd queries philosophically, “other than her just trying to be white, like Mariah Carey, just straightening her hair?”
Again, Cedric feels his face and mood darken, but Zayd wheels around before Cedric can answer as Abby, a girl from the unit, drapes her arms over his shoulders. Cedric surveys the two of them flirting as he tries to pick through the last hour of conversation, in an effort to isolate what’s gnawing at him, making him feel volatile, like he’s pressing something down. Abby spots someone across the room, cheerily says “See ya” to the two of them, and turns to leave.
“She’s always so happy,” Cedric says as he watches her snake across the room toward a wall-mounted TV where David Letterman is double-taking to Paul Schafer. “I hate that. It’s unnatural.”
“I know what you mean,” Zayd replies easily. “For any thinking person, it’s untenable. If you’re a thinking person, you’re upbeat sometimes, sad sometimes, whatever.”
Cedric nods, inspecting every word and feeling, like he often does. He has a jealous admiration for how light-footed and unencumbered Zayd is, how dilemmas of all sorts seem to vent right through him. “Sometimes, I keep things inside and it eats at me,” Cedric says quietly, trying to take things a level deeper. “Like, remember I told you about when I visited my father that time in jail, how he did nothing but talk to my cousin and how it just ate at me for the longest time.
“It wasn’t so much what he said that day that stuck with me,” Cedric continues, “as this feeling that I had trusted him—invested emotions, or whatever, in him—and that he betrayed that. You know, that and other stuff I been through, makes it hard for me, sometimes, to have faith in people. Like the closer I get, the more I worry about being abandoned.”