A Hope in the Unseen (30 page)

On this sunny, unseasonably warm Wednesday in late September, the place is jammed. Of the many issues to discuss, affirmative action is proving the ideal back-to-school subject. Stoking long-standing disputes on the subject, there is news of late, starting with July’s decision by the California Board of Regents to end preferential admissions based on race and this fall’s demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere by minority students.

At Brown, like most top private institutions, affirmative action is offered to “less qualified” and “underrepresented” minority students. Yet, like at its peer institutions, Brown’s bold initiative doesn’t go much beyond the offer of admission. Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic dean will tell you, it’s up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status that he or she may fear classmates have suspected from the first. Not surprisingly, dropout rates among minorities, particularly those of lower income, tend to be higher than the rest.

On all sides of this carefully parsed, middle-ground policy are encampments of passionately intense discussion. At the cafe today are several exchanges on the subject. Cedric, settling at a table inside, orders a ginger ale and trains his ears to a table immediately to his right.
Two professors, both white, are leaning in close over a pair of Anchor Steams.

“Are we doing a service to young people to boost them above their academic level and then not offer the services they need?” asks the squat one with flying gray hair. “Because, who really can? Who can offer that sort of enrichment? You can hardly blame the university. It would take years, and money, and a whole different educational track to bring some affirmative action students to a level where they could compete. There’s no choice but laissez-faire, sink or swim. They should be going to middle-rung universities. There’s no right, as far as I see, to go to an Ivy League institution. If they work hard, their kids can come here. Hell, it’s what everyone else had to do.”

As his burger arrives, Cedric listens and pretends to read the
Brown Daily Herald
, the student newspaper. Eventually, the professors are drowned out by loud conversation at the table on his other side. It’s all Cedric can do not to respond. Their words make him think of Leon Trilling and what he said. He imagines telling them about his long journey, that his struggle has built in him a kind of strength—a conviction about his ability to overcome obstacles—that other kids don’t have. But of course that strength is hard to measure, and lately he’s become uncertain if it will be enough to get him where he needs to be.

The loud people pay their check and leave. The professors, meanwhile, have moved on to the companion controversy about hiring minority faculty members. “It’s a mockery,” the other professor, a tall, distinguished-looking guy, spits, ticking off the names of a few minority professors around campus. “A lot of them are good teachers, sure. But they’re unpublished, not respected, not scholars. What do they bring? Their passionate, oh-so personal ‘perspective.’ Nothing special about that. Jesus, everyone’s got one of those.”

Faculty club interlocutions over “publish or perish” or how affirmative action exacerbates the conflict between the magnetic lecturers and the dogged scholars are not on Cedric’s radar. He manages to be dismissive, digging into his burger, his $2.50 indulgence.

A few minutes later, he emerges from the restaurant and passes a clutch of wrought-iron tables on the sidewalk, favored spots in the warm sun. He spots Stephan Wheelock, his Richard Wright instructor,
twenty-four and black and bursting with passionate personal perspective. Stephan is eating a barbecued chicken sandwich with a friend, a thirty-something white guy who’s visiting Providence. Cedric waves and offers a cursory hello as he passes.

Stephan nods back a greeting and then continues talking excitedly with the friend as Cedric waits for the light to change before crossing the street. “At least, you know, Brown is a socially conscious place. But, you see, it has been a huge transition for me coming here, being brought here under the guise of equality,” says Stephan, graduate of Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a black school not far from Oxford where his father is a preacher and his mother a librarian. “I am constantly having to play catch-up with guys who’ve spent the past five years speaking three languages, visiting Europe, and reading all the right books. Here, at Brown, they say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re all equal, starting on the same footing. Ready, set, go!’ They just don’t get it. Where I come from, people don’t go to France to study. A trip to France is a big deal. I haven’t been reading all the right books since I was twelve and then have some Rhodes Scholar Daddy tell me the rest. I didn’t have that kind of access, access that could empower me.”

Throughout the day, the overheard conversations at lunch echo in Cedric’s head. More than the specifics, he recalls the intensity of the dialogues. At this point, affirmative action is the last thing he wants to hear or think about. During dinner and studying that evening, he finds himself responding to the professors under his breath: So, he got in. If he fails, he fails; if he makes it, he makes it. Why does everyone have to draw conclusions about an entire race from that, or take sides. He wanted a chance; he got one.

The next day, Cedric awakens with renewed ardor, a determination to compete on an even footing, to meet Brown’s academic rigors head-on. After lunch, he strides into his Richard Wright class. Stephan Wheelock smiles at him—“Helloooo, Cedric,” he says theatrically—and Cedric offers a grim nod.

He is counting on this class about the familiar novels of Richard Wright—some of the few books he’s previously read—to help teach him the thinking and writing skills he so desperately needs.

Up to now, it has not been happening. One short paper—an
ungraded one-page autobiographical essay he wrote in class on the first day—came back last week with few comments. With all sixteen students, about half of whom are black or Hispanic, now settled around the seminar table or at desks lining the walls, Wheelock goes over a few “scheduling changes,” cutting assignments off the syllabus, like he did last class and the one before, lightening the class’s requirements. Then he starts the discussion with an overview of Richard Wright’s signature 1940 novel,
Native Son
, which the class is supposed to have read by now.

Cedric, sitting against the wall, opens his copy of the book. He knows it cold. He watches Wheelock—light-skinned, with stylishly thin bifocals on the end of a small, thin nose—going through a brief synopsis of the plot. The book’s central character, Bigger Thomas, is a laborer whose days of poverty and brutishness and frustration lead to the killing of a white woman. After discussing the basic plot for fifteen minutes, Wheelock advances his literary deconstruction by mentioning the novel’s oft-noted companion essay—“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born”—in which Wright tells at length about the creation of his main character, about the five “Biggers” he’s known since his childhood.

“Why did Wright decide to put this essay at the back of the book?” Wheelock asks portentously, as most of the class begins flipping through its 1993 edition of the book. “Back in 1940, Wright made a literary decision as to where to put it. Clearly, he put it at the end for a reason.”

A half-hour of discourse is launched. Cedric looks around the room. There are plenty of black faces. It may not be calculus—his love—but he really knows this book. If he doesn’t raise his hand now, then when? His arm shoots up. “All right, yes, Cedric?” Stephan says, delighted.

“Umm, I think Wright wanted you to figure things out for yourself, so you wouldn’t be thinking about all these larger forces, like racial repression and violence right off,” Cedric says. “He had to put the explanatory essay in the back … otherwise you’d sort of know the answer before you asked the question.”

Stephan nods agreement and other students follow up. Cedric exhales. That wasn’t so hard. The discussion winds along another few
minutes until Brandon, another black in the class, raises his hand. He seems confused.

“Professor Wheelock,” he says. “I have an earlier edition of the book and, well, the essay, ‘How Bigger Was Born,’ is in the front rather than the back. It runs, you know, before you get into the actual novel.”

There’s silence. Air seems to escape from the room. Everyone instantly sees the mishap, which reduces half an hour of vigorous discussion to a waste of breath. Some shake their head, disbelieving, trying not to laugh.

A dazed Wheelock nods once, wordless. His mind seems to race, looking to grab anything to halt the freefall.

“Well, okay … ” he says finally, trying to recover. “So, the question, then, would be why did the powers that be in the publishing world decide to put the essay in the book’s back, you know, in the edition most of you got?”

The frantic rebound gets little response, and in a moment he begins shuffling assignment sheets in front of his chair.

“Let’s see,” he says, forcing a smile. “What do you say we get out a little early today?”

Cedric, sitting at a desk against the wall, looks across a roomful of slackened jaws and stunned gazes—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—and puts his head in his hands.

I
n room 216 of East Andrews Hall, being alone in the room means the automatic granting of “music control.” As agreed upon and enacted on the last day of September, if the other roommate comes in, he has to wait, silently and without complaints—no matter how long it takes—for control of the music to be ceded. Music control is ceded only when the controlling roommate leaves the room. The roommate left behind then immediately assumes control. If one roommate leaves, then returns to find other roommate playing his own music, too bad. Simple enough?

Rob is sitting on his bed. Cedric, on his.

“Agreed,” says Cedric, curtly.

“Okay, agreed,” says Rob, and the two say nothing more that
night. They just sit there in the silence. Since neither of them had “music control” at the time of the agreement, the only way it could be granted was for one to leave. So that night, no one moves and no music is played.

It has not been a good first month for Cedric Jennings and Rob Burton. First, there was the issue of cleanliness, born of a cultural collision between one boy who grew up in casual comfort with a cleaning lady twice a week and the other who spent his life scrubbing dishes and toilets to stave off squalor. Cedric has always been fastidious about his person. Though his room on V Street, his one private place, was often a mess, he always has been neatly dressed and exhaustively scrubbed in public. Now, nothing is private. Just like his person, his room is constantly on display; he might as well be wearing it. The message sent from Rob is the opposite. Rob’s impulse—getting stronger as he feels less and less inclined to give in to Cedric—is not to care about how messy the room is. He doesn’t mind the disarray, why should anyone else? Because his coolness and self-confidence is subterranean, springing from beneath his casual demeanor, it’s important that surface issues, like how clean you keep your room, are afterthoughts.

Meanwhile, if Cedric focuses on what he considers Rob’s faults—his messiness, and, now, his taste in music—he doesn’t have to think about how Rob is a popular kid, at ease, easygoing, and reasonably good looking with his ice-blue eyes. He also tests well; comes from a strong, loving,
Leave It to Beaver
family, and can be sort of funny in the arch, smug, iconoclastic way college kids need to be.

People are constantly coming by the room seeking Rob—to go out drinking with him at the Underground, Brown’s on-campus club, where beer is served; to go to this party or that; to stroll over to the Gate, the favorite campus eatery just a few feet from the dorm, for a late snack; or just to visit, because he makes them feel comfortable.

Cedric knows
he
makes them feel uncomfortable. And he is fast on his way to becoming a hermit—or so he thinks one night when he’s alone with coveted music control and answers several knocks on the door, like Rob’s social secretary.

Cedric is not malicious. Deep down, he sort of likes Rob. He’s just
up to his eyeballs in confusion and fear of failure and loneliness—and he feels worse when he sees the fun everyone else seems to be having.

Clearly, some East Andrews residents are spending serious time and energy having fun. They’re doing all the things that college freshmen have been doing, under various guises and with various aids, since the first tenderfoot left home for Harvard in 1636.

Despite Brown’s self-consciousness about each student’s individuality, the four preferred pastimes are the same here as they are at most every other college: drink beer, smoke pot, dance to deafening music until you drop, and, on the rare occasion, get naked with some other warm body.

Possibly the best explanation why Cedric Jennings is in Brown’s class of 1999 is that he managed to steer clear of the buffet table of adolescent experimentation, believing—rightly, it turns out—that in his neighborhood most of those dishes were poisoned. This was an extraordinary feat, considering how peer pressure at Ballou was backed up by violence and the almost irresistible urge for teenagers to salve deep despair with sex, drugs, and music.

Cedric knows all this, just as he knows his resistance was made possible, back when, by Barbara’s fierce code, Pastor Long’s admonitions against all such licentiousness, and the constant reminders of Cedric Gilliam’s broken journey, testifying to what can happen when someone without hope of personal betterment discovers drinking and drugs. But, eventually, something else took root. Cedric, needing to justify his monkish routine night after night, developed a genuine belief that sacrifice, hard work, and extremely clean living would lead to rewards, including a scholarship to a top college.

But now that he’s made it, the guideposts are gone and all around him smart kids are getting high, getting drunk, and screwing. Even the real smart ones, kids who can eat Cedric’s lunch in almost any subject.