A Hope in the Unseen (15 page)

He’s run through this train of logic before, countless times. He strokes his brow, something he does when he feels stress coming on, and settles into his fallback position. It’s simple, he concludes. MIT wants minority undergraduates, and the program’s corporate sponsors eventually want minority employees. That’s why he’s ended up running a program filled with self-assured middle- or upper-middle-class black and Hispanic kids—leaders of tomorrow, all—many of whom are here for little more than résumé padding.

Still, every year he’ll find room for a few poor kids from bad schools. And they’re the ones that drive him crazy with yearning, the ones who dream in Technicolor but can’t integrate fractions to save their lives.

He chuckles—that last line’s not bad. Susie tells him the student has arrived, and he rises from his chair.

“Have a seat, Cedric,” Ramsey says gruffly. He runs through the complaint from the girl as Cedric sits still on the edge of the chair, wide-eyed, a “Please don’t throw me out” look on his face.

“Look, it’s no big deal. You’re not being sent home or anything,” says Ramsey, finally. “Just be careful when you flirt with the girls. Some of them can be a little sensitive.”

“Okay,” Cedric says. “I will. Or, I won’t, you know, whatever.”

“Fine,” says Ramsey, unable to suppress a smile. Then he pauses
for a moment, not sure if he should take it any further. “Hasn’t been such an easy summer for you, has it?” he finally says.

“Naw,” says Cedric, looking down. “A lot this stuff, I just didn’t expect. I guess I thought there’d be more kids like me here.”

Ramsey nods, feeling his gut tighten. Just once, he’d like to rant a bit, to let a ghetto kid like this know that the affirmative action deck has been stacked, that the best of intentions, these days, mostly mean embracing upwardly mobile blacks and Hispanics who are likely to succeed, and that he shouldn’t blame himself for not being able to keep up with the others. But where to begin, what to say? Instead, after a moment, he stands, letting Cedric know the meeting’s over. “Look, just keep at it. There’s still two weeks left—a lot can happen in that time,” he says, as Cedric nods, thankful, it seems, for the encouragement, and quietly leaves.

Sitting alone in his small office, Ramsey shakes his head. It just seems like there’s no way to give kids like that credit for the distance they’ve already traveled. This Cedric had to run three more laps than the other kids, but he’s still two laps behind, so he loses. Beautiful. He starts to think about how long his own journey has been—how isolated he was as one of the only black undergraduates here in the early 1950s, the tensions in his family because some of them thought he was on his high horse, off to the big university. But, even now, he remembers that he knew with great clarity what he needed to do, how he needed to turn away from slights and confrontation and let his grades speak loudly for him. He felt like some sort of black pioneer whom others would follow.

He thought that by now there’d be a lot more black professors and students around here. He catches himself. He knows he shouldn’t go down this path—it always ends with him cursing and riled up, and he’s been feeling this way too many days of late. Because what the hell
is
this program doing with a white faculty director? Nice guy, Leon Trilling, done a lot for minorities, but come on. “Enough,” he says to himself. He can’t be getting all worked up, not at his age.

He rises and begins gathering his things to go home, looking out the window again, thinking of his lovely wife, his successful grown
kids, and his retirement place in Saint Kitts, which more and more is beckoning to him.

T
he TV reception is lousy. Cedric flips the knob, adjusts the contrast, and fools with a mysterious red button, but all he can get are shadow images of the soulful Sisters With Voices, or SWV, mugging on MTV.

Someone’s behind him. He spins. The whole gang is standing in the doorway of the small TV room on MacGregor’s first floor: Mark and Belinda, another boy named Arryn, along with Jenica, Isa, and Micah. “Happy Birthday, Cedric,” Mark says in his raspy tough voice. “Here’s your present. It’s a ghetto bag, ’cause you’re soooo ghetto.”

Cedric hoots. He can’t believe this. His birthday is in a couple days, and the paper bag has condoms, M&Ms, Nivea skin creme, batteries for a boom box, a two-play rap CD—little stuff, nothing expensive. But it’s the idea that’s great, and everyone’s in on it. Ghetto! It has been Cedric’s favorite word in the past two weeks—his imprimatur of coolness. Someone can be ghetto in what they say or do or own—like cassettes or shirts or shoes—if they suggest the edgy urban version of blackness.

The whole thing, Cedric marveled a few days ago, is simply amazing. In this crowd of assimilated, careerist black and Hispanic kids, it is he, Cedric—king of the Ballou nerds, bottom of the Southeast D.C. pecking order—who can claim a particular brand of racial authenticity. Here, by default, he’s actually an arbiter of the fashions, tastes, and habits of inner-city life that exert some sway over young blacks of any stripe. Just amazing.

What’s happening, though, goes a bit deeper. Cedric is slowly letting his true self emerge. Midterms triggered it, forcing him to accept that he’s way behind the others and might as well reveal his background rather than hide it. What’s the point of putting up a false front, he finally decided, of affecting a posture like he’s some suburban doctor’s son hitting triples in every class? Yes, he’s way behind, academically. How could he not be, coming from Ballou?

So he’s opening himself up the only way anyone ever can: bit by bit. After presenting the birthday bag, some of the girls start talking about the activity-jammed weekend, which will start with a bus trip to Cape Cod the next morning.

Everyone is going. “I can’t wait to see you swimming, Cedric,” flirts Isa.

“I can swim and all,” Cedric says, just in case anyone thinks he can’t. “But, I’m not going. Lots of work and stuff.” This prompts a pile-on. No one’s letting him slip away. It’s six on one. They all agree there must be some other reason, and then they bore in for the truth. Finally, he gives in: no bathing suit.

A moment later, he’s being dragged by a posse, amid much laughter, across a walking bridge over the Charles River to the posh stores on Boston’s Newbury Street. The girls fuss over which one looks best. Cedric says that it needs to be big in the crotch, and there’s some wrestling among the racks, giggling and arm punching.

On the bus to the Cape, he’s at his buoyant best, leading the group in song, bouncing with ease through an array of hip-hop hits. Singing in front of the other kids feels fine, with people clapping and humming, affirming his specialness, sort of like he used to feel in church. He has replaced gospel classics with rhythm-and-blueser Warren G, hip-hopper R. Kelly, and rapper Da Brat. He knows every lyric and vocal inflection of countless tunes—about violence or romance, about fearless men and sex-hungry women—songs that are a fixture of his proscribed, secondhand life back home.

The next night, July 24, his seventeenth birthday, he brings a plastic bag of cassettes onto the Boston Line ferry for a dance-party cruise around Boston Harbor. “Wow. You really know music,” the black DJ says as Cedric runs through a playlist from his collection.

“Well, it’s sort of all I got,” Cedric says, shrugging. He spends much of the evening happily watching a bunch of very smart kids dance to his tunes.

By the middle of the following week, even Cedric realizes that something has happened. Something unexpected. Perseverance finally seems to be paying off. In the last two weeks, he has risen to the solid middle of the advanced calculus class. While not quite to the heights of
Andrew Parker, a tireless Cedric is clearly the hungrier lion. He is improving in chemistry, adequate in robotics, and showing some good comments on his writings for English. Physics remains the sole sore spot. And even here, blackboard scribbles are actually starting to make sense. His exhausting panic is steadily dissolving. He’s getting some answers right in chemistry, and almost all of them right in calculus. It feels good after five long weeks of confusion.

Good enough, in fact, that he’s able to keep his mind off what he has to do after classes end today, Wednesday, July 26. When English class is dismissed at 2:05, he examines a campus map from the MITES welcome packet. He searches for the building near Guggenheim Laboratory, home of the aeronautics and astronautics department. No trouble finding it on the map, but his bearings are a little off. He goes to one wrong building, then another, and eventually finds himself running through long corridors—mostly empty for the summer—of what he thinks must be the right building.

He finally sees an office door half open and light coming from within.

“Professor Trilling,” he says, catching his breath. “Sorry I’m late.”

Though Cedric has managed not to think too much about this meeting—his mind and spirit wrestling, each day, with so much else—now that he’s in the office he finds himself paralyzed. He stands just inside the doorway, awkward and frozen.

The professor, in a casual, checked, short-sleeved shirt, steps around his wide desk so the two are standing face-to-face, and he ushers Cedric to a chair with a sweep of his hand.

Cedric, trying desperately to get his voice to work, looks down at Trilling’s shoes. Brown bucks. His mind races. “Those are nice, umm, they Timberland?” he says haltingly. Trilling looks down, as though unaware he was even wearing shoes, and says nothing. He returns to his desk and gets down to business.

He opens a manila file and, after a moment, asks if Cedric is “thinking about applying and coming to MIT.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cedric says, squeezing out a tight laugh. “I’ve been wanting to come for years. Like my whole life.”

There’s an interminable silence, five seconds maybe, as Trilling
looks down at the file again and then lifts his gaze to meet Cedric’s eye. “Well, I don’t think you’re MIT material,” the professor says flatly. “Your academic record isn’t strong enough.”

Cedric is stunned. Wondering, momentarily, if he’s now supposed to get up and leave, he tries to extend the meeting by asking the professor to elaborate. “What do you mean by ‘academic record’?” Cedric says, surprised he got the sentence out. “I mean, my high school grades couldn’t be much better.”

Trilling looks back down at the file to retrieve a key number. “I see your SATs are only a 910,” he says, “and right there, that’s at least 200 points below what they need to be to be accepted at MIT.”

“And also,” the professor adds, trying to close it out before Cedric can respond, “your work here this summer has not been up to that of many of the other students.”

Cedric looks down at the carpeting, searching for something, anything, that might save it, that might make this white guy understand what it’s been like for him, how hard it has been, what it took to get this far. “The thing is,” he says, speaking with a slow, word-by-word cadence, like a recitation, “I can work harder than other people. When I really set my mind on something, anything, I can get there. It’s about wanting it more in your heart.” His throat catches on the last word.

Trilling leans forward in his chair. He’s been at this juncture with many students before, but this boy is putting up a fierce fight. He takes a deep breath. “That perspective, that belief, Cedric, is admirable, but it also can set you up for disappointment. And, at the present time, it just doesn’t seem to be enough.”

On that last word, he quickly reaches for a pen on his desk and tears a sheet from his memo pad. “Here, let me give you the name of a professor I know at Howard University in Washington,” he says, looking down and scribbling, “and another one I know at University of Maryland. You should call them. If you do well at either of those colleges in your first year or two, maybe you can apply for transfer to MIT.”

Trilling holds the paper out across the desk.

Cedric, his eyes wide, can barely hear what is being said. His teeth are grinding, pressing together with such force it feels like his bulging
temples will explode. He watches his fingers reach out for the small square of memo paper. But it feels like someone else’s hand, and then someone else’s body that rises from the chair and turns to silently leave.

When he gets to his dorm room, he slams the heavy wood door shut and leans his back against it. He looks down and sees the slip of paper still in his hand, held gingerly between the thumb and forefinger just the way he plucked it from Trilling’s hand. He crumples it, throws it at the garbage can haphazardly, and watches it hit the wall.

He recovers his bearings enough to walk stiffly to the bed and lie down, closing his eyes and beginning a first replay of the scene: of him in the office, of Trilling’s words—“not MIT material.” Remembering how small he felt sitting there, how he tried to heave up some explanation of all he’d been through, a word starts crowding into the passing images and he tries to press it down—it’s not right—but he can’t.

With his eyes still closed, Cedric yells, “RACIST!”

The door stays locked as the hours pass and night falls. Isa comes by and knocks on the door. And later, Jenica. They call out, wondering if he’s inside, and he holds his breath until he eventually hears their footsteps fade away in the hall.

The next morning, he walks into physics class just as it starts, slips into a front-row desk by the door, and looks forward at the blackboard, not following any of what’s being scribbled. A moment later, he feels a tap on his arm. It’s Isa, a row behind him, passing him a note at hip level, her eyes fixed on the teacher.

He opens it: “What happened?”

He writes a note back describing the meeting and saying he’s thinking of leaving, of just going home. Washington hands out a worksheet, and Cedric gazes at it, unable to concentrate. Twenty minutes later, the note comes back. He opens it and looks down at the bottom. It’s also signed by Jenica, who’s sitting to Isa’s left. “You can’t just run away,” the note says. “You have to stay and prove to them you have what it takes …. We all care about you and love you.” Cedric reads the note twice. He’s afraid he’s going to start bawling, right here in class, and swallows hard a few times. He folds the note gently and puts it in his hip pocket.