A Hope in the Unseen

by Ron Suskind

  He has, of course, lost a measure of the broad representational resonance he had back then, when his life was indistinguishable from that of countless other minority youngsters left behind in the land Michael Harrington called the “other America.”

  His life nowadays is, in some ways, like nobody else’s. As the subject of a best-selling book, he’s been on Oprah, and spoken regularly at colleges and high schools around the country. This book—a story of hope and faith carried largely through the words and actions of Cedric and his mother—is now a standard text, read in evening book clubs and churches and by incoming freshmen at scores of universities. People call and e-mail me and Cedric with prayers, pleas, and plaudits. Mothers intone his name to prod their kids to higher achievement. From time to time, he’s been hugged on the street by strangers.

  The basic appeal of Cedric’s story was never rooted in his exceptionalism—the rise of a one-in-a-million genius or a child graced with some stunning opportunity. He is, in his basic makeup, so very much like countless other young people I’ve met in my reportorial travels. The power of his saga was—and is—driven instead by the tough choices that Cedric made and how those choices set his course and, over time, nourished his character. These were classically American choices, the consequences of which unfold, for better or worse, in each day of his life.

  His passing celebrity has little to do with that life. The people he meets are generally not readers. The house he’s seeking today is that of a single mother and three small children where there have been reports of abuse. He is Mr. Jennings to them. The mother is under court supervision, and his job is to assess her soundness as a caregiver and the well-being of the kids. In this summer of 2004, Cedric is now a social worker for the District of Columbia, a job he took in the spring. He deals with some of the very tough cases—children in perilous situations at home, or those who’ve been taken from their homes and placed in the way station of temporary foster care. His aim, as a case manager for twenty or so kids, is to seek stability and permanence. That means to get kids out of dangerous situations; work with birth parents who’ve lost their children to help get their kids back and responsibly care for them; or get kids formally adopted by foster parents. He testifies in District of Columbia Family Court a few times a month about what’s working in this equation, or failing, and he is a linchpin in some very tough decisions. The cases he sees are often women struggling with the perils his mother faced during his youth—and mostly faced down. The children, who find themselves coming to adult-strength understandings about how cold the world can sometimes be, he calls “his kids.” He knows how they feel.

  This is the end of the story, in which Cedric has come full circle to work the streets of Washington which he left, for the most part, when he loaded suitcases in 1995 for Brown University. Much has occurred between his long ago departure and recent return. When the book ended, Cedric was a second-year student, getting his bearings academically and socially at Brown, and feeling the nascent stirrings of optimism. He was searching for a home in the wider country, a land of opportunity. And felt he was getting closer. It was 1997. He was nineteen.

  Since then, thousands of readers have asked, essentially, the same question: Whatever happened to Cedric, his mother, his father, the kids at Ballou, his friends at Brown?

  Here’s what happened to them.

  A Hope in the Unseen came out when Cedric was a junior. Brown, which is used to dealing with real celebrities, like John Kennedy Jr., remained nonplussed, and by senior year Cedric’s days were returning to their pedestrian collegiate rhythm.

  Fall for seniors is the season of job fairs. Cedric found himself the object of attention. As an African American student “who was cutting it,” as he’d say—much less the protagonist of a book many of those in corporate diversity departments had embraced—he was a prize. Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, courted him. Management consultants as well. He’d ask me what life was like in those types of firms. Most kids from upper middle class suburbs are clear about the nature of various job choices—doctor, lawyer, investment banker, corporate vice president—from their early teens. It’s the orbit their fathers live in. Cedric, I realized, knew no one who had any such job. I filled him in—trying to be objective and accurate, value-neutral. But I was worried. I knew how inhospitable the cutthroat lower decks of an investment bank or consulting firm could be. Plenty of my own college classmates took that path—many of whom had been bred from pre-pubescence for grinning, kill-or-be-killed competition.

  Cedric, after a few introductory interviews, started to sense this might not be the world for him, even as he watched classmates sign up for infantry slots in corporations and the various professions. As spring of senior year arrived, questions about what he’d do next drew a shug. “We’ll just have to see,” he’d say.

  Then, it was all but over. Barbara planned ahead, this time, and the procession—including Cedric’s sisters Leslie, Neddie, her son, Lawrence, Clarence Taylor and his wife—all descended on Providence. I was there with my family, as well, and helped Cedric pack up his room.

  For the weekend’s festivities, Ray Charles played “Georgia.” Senator John Glenn and Steven Spielberg got honorary degrees. And, in his speech, Brown President Gordon Gee mentioned the journeys of a few students, including Cedric. He recited the entire passage from Hebrews and noted how Cedric was propelled by “the love of his mother, Barbara, who never wavered in her belief that he would succeed.”

  Barbara, standing in a crowded corner of the field, whispered to my wife that it was “nice that he read some Scripture—that’s something everyone here could use.”

  Then Cedric proceeded, arm in arm with Zayd, Nicole, and a many-hued host of others, to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in education, a minor in applied math, and a 3.3 grade point average. An Ivy League credential, an indisputable American prize. The unseen? Still up ahead. But now he had something in his hand; a diploma carrying powerful presumptions of talent and expected success.

  First thing he did: get a job at the Salvation Army. I’d learned, over the years, not to judge the merits of Cedric’s various moves. He had his reasons. Knowing those reasons, if he would tell me, was central to my education about what the world looked like through his eyes. Though we were now friends, I never stopped doing this. In some ways, this is what good friends do for each other.

  And, by the mid-summer after graduation, I began to understand how this job—helping to manage the Salvation Army office in Providence—made a kind of sense. It was all part of a balancing act between opposing worlds: the one Cedric hailed from; and the one to which he’d now gained passage, with a golden ticket.

  While various friends backpacked across Europe on their parents’ credit cards, blowing off steam and collecting tales of adventure before diving into training programs or graduate school, Cedric prowled the racks at the SA. He straightened the books. He put nice items out front, sent others off to charity. This place was familiar—it was his—with reliable values he might need up ahead.

  But as the seasons changed, and a new class arrived at Brown, it was clearly time to venture forward. Cedric nosed about for other jobs. Made some calls. He ended up at an Internet college bookseller—VarsityBooks.com. It was the fall of 1999—the very peak of the Internet boom. The company, started by a few Harvard Law School graduates, relies on an admirable bit of statutory arcana: most states require universities to publish the lists of required texts of the courses they offer. By late September, Cedric was sharing a boiler room in Washington with other Ivy League graduates. VarsityBooks.com would have them post course lists and required reading on designated websites for each university. Incoming students, generally confused and overwhelmed, would click on the sites to buy their assigned reading. Books would be shipped from warehouses straight to dorm rooms at a slightly discounted price. Well-known college bookstores and university co-ops were soon struggling for their lives. Young recruits like Cedric were rewarded with a tr
ip to a campus to do marketing for the company. Cedric decided he wanted to see some friends in Providence. The Brown Co-Op, at that point, was selling the paperback of A Hope in the Unseen, and had a three-by-two-foot poster of the cover, with Cedric’s face, in the window. Soon, Cedric arrived on campus with an Internet “solution” designed to put that very Co-Op out of business.

  After spending a few days with his friends in the Co-Op—where he and I had signed books—Cedric was souring on the company’s mission. Back in Washington, he saw VarsityBooks.com’s president at the office and mentioned that he didn’t “like the way the company did business” or “the business itself … driving the coops out of business.” Yes, that was his opinion. It was something Cedric has always done: speak his mind, take a stand, like Barbara taught him, on matters of principle. He was summarily fired.

  In February of 2001, an educational program inside the federal government, called the Department of the Interior University, created a forum to highlight “career balance and diversity.” It was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, so bosses, mostly white men, would have an added excuse to take their employees, often black women, to a luncheon for the forum at the Mayflower Hotel. The guest of honor that day would be a hero to many women, African American and otherwise, who toil inside the great federal city—Barbara Jennings.

  Barbara, always private (though not shy), had to be dragged there. The organizers assured her she would not be asked to give a speech. But, of all the characters in this book, the most intense affection is usually directed at Barbara. When readers left her, her life had begun to take on a more reliable, steady rhythm. She was alone, now. It was time to “start taking care of myself,” she said, and get her own house in order. She’d moved back to the house on 15th Street, paid off some old bills and, after Cedric’s graduation, moved to an apartment in Maryland, just across the D.C. line. Two years later, she moved to another one—a secure, if ungainly, building in an apartment complex in Southeast, about two miles northeast of Ballou.

  She became more involved in the church, tutoring teenage girls about the responsibilities of parenting. She went to Powerfest, the Apostolic Pentecostal convention, every August. She moved through various jobs at the Department of Agriculture, building years toward retirement. Once when we were lunching she said it would “be fine to have a companion, someone to talk to at night,” but she was settling into an appreciation of being alone and being “in control of my own life.” After all the ups and downs across decades, quiet and control were to be prized.

  When she arrived at the Mayflower, it was clear that this day would possess neither virtue. An army of African American women who inhabit the wide middle rungs of the U.S. government had arrived for the luncheon with their bosses. It was a day to “celebrate the Barbaras” one speaker said.

  As dessert was served, Barbara, Cedric, and I stood for questions. Most of them, not surprisingly, were addressed to her. I’d heard things that I’d never heard her say before, despite our years of heart to heart exchanges. Someone asked how she managed to build a bond with this “writer, who is clearly a white guy,” drawing nervous laughter from the mixed race crowd. Barbara said it wasn’t until she met my wife, Cornelia, near the end of the project, that “I really began to fully trust Ron.” It was a barbecue for the Jenningses and Suskinds and “Cornelia and I cooked and talked about everything, and I felt like I’d known her all my life,” Barbara said. “I figured if she saw something in him, I suppose he’s okay.” Score one for gender over race.

  After a bit, a youngish woman rose tentatively. She had a question, but she held the microphone for a moment before she was able to speak. “Ms. Jennings, I live not far from where you raised Cedric, right off of Good Hope Road. Last week, my nine-year-old son saw someone shot on the street right in front of him. And he’s acting very different now. And he won’t talk about it. And I just need to know everything you know, right this minute.”

  The collisions that are so much a part of Washington—of so many single mothers who work for the public’s good by day and cross town to a landscape of neglect by night—shattered the afternoon’s good cheer. Barbara thought for a moment and then spoke softly. “You need to find a way to make him feel comfortable talking to you—to let him know that’s the best thing he can do, and that it’s not burdening you for him to tell you what’s in his heart. And when he talks, just listen, and don’t tell him anything. I know that’s hard. Because we as moms are so anxious, and there’s so much they need to know. But, first, you have to listen for a long time.”

  Afterward, as the round luncheon tables emptied, a mob surrounded Barbara—women with a lifetime of urgent questions, certain that this quiet, firm woman, with her hard-earned insights, had the answers.

  Two months later, in mid-April 2001, I was sitting next to Cedric in a pew of New Bethel Baptist Church, an old brick church not far from Scripture Cathedral. It was a Saturday morning, and the church was crowded. Their honored deacon, Clarence Taylor, had died.

  Along with his role as Cedric’s chemistry teacher and mentor, Clarence was a key member of New Bethel and the Washington religious community. Various middleweight preachers showed up to eulogize him, led by the church’s eloquent head pastor, Walter Fauntroy, a longtime aide to Dr. Martin Luther King and a Congressional representative from the District for twenty years.

  As one speaker after another hailed Clarence’s life, Cedric leaned in close and said, “I’m so nervous I can’t breathe.” It was Clarence himself who set up this final test for his old student. The previous week, Clarence had had a dream. He told his wife, Sandra, that he would die in a few days and started to pack up his belongings. He gave her instructions about his funeral. Most notably, Cedric would have to give one of the eulogies. The request was non-negotiable. Clarence, who’d had a long history of heart problems, died on the day he’d predicted—Tuesday, April 17, 2001—of heart failure.

  And now, Cedric’s name was being called. In a moment, he was before the audience, frozen, reading a few prepared remarks. He stopped. Looked down at the casket, at the foot of the stage, and up at a thousand eyes, everyone knowing who he was, and who Clarence was to him. “Lots of times he’d say things to me and I’d say, ‘Mr. Taylor, I have no idea what you’re talking about!’” The room erupted in laughter—no easy feat at a moment like this, with a fifty-one-year-old man cut down in life’s prime. But everyone here, including some former students, knew of Clarence’s famously elliptical queries, his winding citations of Scripture, his penchant for answering a simple question with a more complex one. Then, Cedric stopped and looked into the middle distance, as though he was seeing the two of them in the chemistry classroom. “Well, he’d answer me, he’d say, ‘Cedric, let me give you a clue.’”

  The room was still. “And that’s what he’s doing right now. He’s giving us a clue, all of us, about how to live a holy life walking in the light of God … ” And then Cedric preached about the magic of the divine word, as the audience sat rapt and wept and professional preachers from the stage knew they’d been bested. After countless hours of give and take between Cedric and Clarence, filling long afternoons in the chemistry classroom of a forgotten school, this was a final moment of call and response. The teacher now gone; the pupil rising to teach. As the casket was lifted, the choir sang Hymn 189, “When peace like a river, attendeth my way … ,” and Cedric could all but hear Clarence’s voice.

  Cedric at that point was working at MicroStrategy, Inc., a northern Virginia data mining company that was hiring even after the Internet boom had turned to bust. Cedric was in a department that trained new workers. The company spent lavishly. A basket of fruit and chocolates came the day he accepted the job the previous fall. The annual corporate retreat was held on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Cedric, though, had been moving toward other priorities. He had been chatting with Clarence and some of his favorite teachers over the winter, and was thinking more about a career in some branch of education. He sent off a few appl
ications. A few weeks after Clarence’s funeral, MicroStrategy, facing problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission, began to collapse. In one day, the company laid off nearly a third of its employees—and Cedric got a pink slip. The next day, he received another letter—a thick envelope of acceptance from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

  Students come in countless varieties, but college life is almost always the same. Those familiar reference points—all-nighters, pizza deliveries, imperious professors, hours of idle (though not pointless) chitchat—are part of the American educational package and would again define Cedric’s life. At Harvard’s school of education, he kept mostly to himself and strived to keep a low profile, slipping into the mix of the other students. “I just wanted to be judged on what kind of work I did, not what people felt from the book,” he told me. It was largely a successful effort. At one point, in the second semester of Harvard’s one year master’s program, a professor teaching urban education threw up a slide of “A Hope in the Unseen” and mentioned some lessons drawn from the book. “I understand the protagonist is not doing very well,” the professor said, grimly. “I’ve heard he’s working at the GAP in Providence.” One student cut him off. “Excuse me, Professor—actually he’s a student here at the Graduate School.” The professor was stunned. Cedric made himself known a few months later, when he graduated with a 3.7 grade point average.

  At that point, he started speaking ten or fifteen times a year to high schools, colleges, or educational groups for modest fees. The Harvard credential provided a measure of instant, convenient credibility; he could speak about his personal experiences and segue into educational theory and practice. The combination of speaking gigs and graduate degrees—funded by more student loans—was a natural fit. But it wasn’t a career. He wanted more hands-on training in the kind of work, he said, that made him “feel like I was actually helping people.”