A Hope in the Unseen (32 page)

“So you coming with me this weekend to Harambee?” Chiniqua asks, managing to make it sound casual. “Just people hanging around, you know, like us …. It must get mighty lonely just being by yourself so much.”

“No, it’s okay,” Cedric says as they get off the elevator at the second floor—he breaking away toward his room; she, toward hers. “I’ll be fine. Really, I will.”

She knows he’s lying, so she makes sure the invitation is left standing.

“Well, maybe some other time.”

C
edric takes the other path a few nights later, when he ventures out of his lair and finds himself a racial stranger in many rooms. Mostly they’re dorm rooms on the second floor of Andrews, where freshmen, here like elsewhere, spend an unfathomable number of hours sitting on their beds—heads against the wall or propped pillows—semistudying or not, listening to music, catching a little TV, sending off e-mail messages while flipping through yesterday’s student newspaper and talking about
“you know, nothing,” which means everything. Just plain being is pretty damn interesting in these first few months of stay-up-as-late-as-you-want independence.

John and Zayd’s room, with the unit’s top CD collection, is a favored place to hang, and there’s often a crowd inside. When Zayd’s there, Cedric feels comfortable dropping by, so he frequently takes a route that passes by the room on his way in and out of the dorm after dinner.

One evening in mid-October he sees Zayd combing his short, dirty-blond hair in the mirror near his open door. They’ve seen each other a few times in the past couple of weeks, walking back from classes in the late afternoon or catching a midnight slice of pizza at the Gate.

“Hey, it’s been a couple of days. What’s up?” asks Zayd, and soon the two are sitting on Zayd’s bed, some Boyz II Men on the CD, and Cedric is filling the room with his talk.

For Cedric, each encounter with Zayd is an opportunity. As a trustworthy white peer—Cedric’s first—Zayd is a sounding board for questions and comments that Cedric has harbored for years, notions about white America that reverberate endlessly in the echo chamber of Southeast.

“So, do you think the cops framed O.J.?” Cedric says, prodding.

Zayd, who by inclination and rearing is sympathetic toward the so-called oppressed, nods along but is reserved. “Do cops frame black suspects? Absolutely, all the time. Did they frame O.J.? I think there’s just too much evidence to fabricate. I think, though, that O.J. was helped by all the black guys who’ve been framed for all the years.”

Cedric nods at this judicious response and wants to know Zayd’s thoughts on other black martyrs. Midway through his list, John wanders in. By then, Cedric has made it to Marion Barry, whom he says “was completely framed by white cops.” John jumps in with the standard white counterresponse, “Look, he did it. Right? He was smoking the crack in the room with the girl. Doesn’t matter if he was targeted or not.”

“But, like, that’s the point,” says Cedric. “He was a suspect from the first day he became mayor, ‘cause he’s black. A black is a suspect, no matter who he is. And eventually they got him.”

Zayd nods at this. “Yeah, definitely, blacks are racial suspects and that skews the equation.”

Around they go, hashing it out in this freshly painted, drywalled holding pen, with its little mirror and sink, where kids hashed things out last year and will again next year and the year after. It’s just that this year an exotic bird is among them, an authentic ghetto kid who, for whatever reason, made it through the urban inferno without donning an armor. Cedric can take his off. Once he finally starts talking, he’s open and transparent.

He’s a draw. The room usually fills when Cedric is around and, soon, Ira Volker is here, along with Florian Keil, his soft-spoken German roommate whose father runs a Boston arm of the Goethe Institute, the German government’s cultural ministry abroad.

Neither says too much. But as they listen to Cedric’s speech—his black urban expressions, sometimes wrapped around an inappropriate infinitive verb or dropped suffix—a little street creeps into all their voices, part accommodation, part unconscious imitation. Cedric, whose ear is sensitive to such inflections, is not sure if he should be flattered or offended.

Without offering much about himself, Cedric senses their ardor to make him part of the group. His blackness and his standoffishness, his unwillingness to party with them, seems to make everyone worry that there’s an unspoken racial subtext: that he doesn’t like them because they’re white or something. Cedric knows everyone will feel better once he shows that he likes everyone else, proving that goodwill at Brown crosses racial lines. This bothers Cedric, and yet the desire to make himself belong actually intensifies as word spreads of the disputes with Rob. Well-intentioned fellow unit members try to intervene. A few nights after the racial discussions in Zayd’s room, Zeina Mobassaleh gets Cedric alone in his room and makes a plea for reconciliation. “Cedric, why don’t you and Rob just talk it out. Rob is really a nice guy. The problem is communication.”

“Zeina, look, he and I are just so different, and us being across the room from each other, there’s gonna be bad stuff,” Cedric responds, shutting off her efforts.

Cedric doesn’t want to get into the nuances of the conflict, but the
situation is clearly souring with each day. His fatigue from acting as Rob’s social secretary causes some mishaps, albeit unintentional. One night he forgets to pass on a phone message and Rob is understandably upset about it. Cedric, knowing he screwed up, manages to apologize.

Then it happens again. Someone called about not being able to meet Rob for a chemistry study session. Cedric took the message but then forgot to pass it on. A few hours later, while Cedric is reading his education textbook in the lounge, Rob storms in. He stood outside the chemistry building for an hour, waiting for his study partner. Eventually, he got the guy on the phone and felt like an idiot.

“You didn’t give me the message, and it screwed up my whole night. I was standing out there for an hour,” says Rob, barely suppressing a shout. “I mean, are you doing it on purpose?!”

“No, look, I was wrong,” Cedric says, regretful. “Really, I’m sorry.”

But Rob keeps going. He points his finger at Cedric and glares, hard-eyed. “Don’t let it happen again.” He stomps out of the lounge and back to the room.

Maybe Rob would have said the same thing had his roommate been white or Asian or Hispanic. But Cedric can’t be sure of that. He sees condescension. He sees effrontery. He sees things that blacks see and maybe whites don’t. A second later, he’s rushing back to the room on Rob’s heels.

The two of them square off in the middle of their room. “Don’t you talk to me like I’m a child or something,” Cedric shouts. “Talking to me like I’m less than you, like you have no respect for me. You don’t know me, so don’t speak to me like that.”

“You don’t know me, either,” counters Rob, not practiced at confrontation the way Cedric is. “Listen, you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

“All I know is that if you talk to me that way again, I’m gonna fuck you up. I’ll kick your ass.”

“Just try it!” Rob shouts back, right up in Cedric’s face, clearly knowing the proper response to that one. “Just fucking try it!” This time Cedric, who hasn’t punched anyone since eighth grade, storms out of the room.

Roaming the halls, he searches for someone to talk to about the confrontation. Rob, it seems, is a friend of nearly everyone on the hall. Cedric knocks on Chiniqua’s door. No answer. She’s been visiting friends at Harambee a lot lately.

He runs down the hall. Zayd understands the dynamics of the unit, and he’s not close to Rob. Zayd will understand. But while Cedric—pounding Zayd’s locked door—has few cards in his hand, Zayd has many. Standing there, Cedric tries to figure out where Zayd might be. He could be visiting Bear Beinfeld, a popular sophomore who is Zayd’s childhood friend and offers easy access to a more diverse, nonfreshman world. He could be visiting one of many women, lots of them in upper classes, that he already knows. He might be meeting a professor on Thayer Street. No way to find him; he could be anywhere.

Deflated, Cedric writes a note on Zayd’s message pad with the grease pencil. “Zayd, Need to talk, quick,—Cedric. It’s IMPORTANT. YOU CAN COME BY LATE!” Then he flees from the dorm, walking for hours around the dark campus, feeling like a fugitive and wondering what it would be like if he just dropped out and went home.

C
edric Gilliam stands on the edge of a graveyard at 19th and E streets, Southeast, Washington, and checks to see if he has time for a cigarette. He’s a little ahead of schedule this warmish autumn evening, and he leans against the cemetery’s low brick wall, slowly sucking and tasting each puff while he runs through the string of events that landed him here.

Maybe he lost his head a little, let things get out of hand. Everything was going so well in the first few months out, his hair-cutting and a little side dealing balancing out just fine, the women happy that he could now stay the night, an open-ended expanse of freedom up ahead. The problem was the heroin, or not so much the beloved stuff itself as what it did to the rest of things. He started doing a little too much of it. Just a little extra. And, by spring, things were starting to fray with him and Leona, where he was living. They got in this huge fight—she
doesn’t do drugs or anything—and she threw him out. He thinks she also tipped off his parole officer, because right after that fight, it so happens, the guy brought him in for a surprise drug test, which he failed. Then the guy was all over him, all righteous, and he had to go into a program and get tested all the time, until he got his last chance to test clean at the end of June. When he failed that one, there was nothing to do but lay low. By then he was living with Sherene, who’s been real nice to have him, considering the U.S. marshals have already been by his mom’s house. Real nice, that is, until last Friday, when she told him she’s got too much to lose—a nice new apartment and a new job—to risk having him around, having marshals come by her apartment or office looking for him. Not that she was ready to abandon him; she just told him it was time to turn himself in.

He yelled and cursed at her, all the time suspecting that she was right. Last weekend, sleeping where he could, looking for friends to shack up with, and scratching up just enough cash to get by did its part in nudging him along. But there was something else. Over the long weekend he also thought a lot about Lavar. They had some good talks over the spring and early summer. Real friendly. They laughed a little and would have gone to that concert if Barbara hadn’t stood in the way. He thought about all that, and how the boy’s a little bit like his ol’ dad. Not that he’s tough in the usual ways, but he’s got a tough craftiness about him. Figures out where he wants to go, figures out a way to get there. Doesn’t back off of things—goes right at them. And thinking about that on Sunday, sitting on a stoop in an out-of-the-way part of Northeast, he started thinking about Brown, how that boy is sort of showing him up by managing things—handling classes at a famous university and getting settled, far from home—while his father is running away, ducking and hiding. And that was it. Yesterday, he placed a call to Captain Roy Grillo, a parole supervisor he has known since he was a guard at Lorton in the mid-1980s. They set a place and time.

The cigarette is only half finished when an unmarked blue sedan from the D.C. Department of Corrections rounds the corner on 19th at 6:15 sharp. Cedric considers snuffing and pocketing what’s left—a prison habit but something he hasn’t done in the last ten months of
freedom and relative plenty. He looks intently at the butt for an instant, not sure what to do, then drops it, and stamps it hard under the heel of his freshly shined shoe.

“Man, you sure this is what you want to do?” says Grillo through the lowered passenger side window as he pulls to the curb.

Cedric looks at him a moment, surprised by the question. “Yeah, ummm, I guess,” he says finally. “I just want to go ahead and get this shit over with.”

He thinks about that exchange—about how Grillo seemed to offer a free man’s choice and how he opted for the responsible course—a thousand times over the ensuing month. At first it felt sort of good being the stand-up guy, taking his medicine. But week to week it gets harder. For one, it seems like knowing that he could still be outside hustling, eluding the U.S. marshalls, actually makes his days back at Lorton feel harsher, more depriving, than any time he can remember.

Then there’s his placement—a bed in the most dangerous facility in the complex, a miserable, medium-security zoo where he’s cut off from all the scams and good contacts he built up in minimum security over most of the 1990s. So he talks to almost no one and counts the days.

At three o’clock on a cold morning in mid-October, he hears the fat night guard’s boots tapping along on the cell block’s concrete floor between a row of beds. “Don’t worry, I’m already up,” Cedric says in a loud whisper, sitting up, as the wide silhouette nods from behind a flashlight’s glare. “I don’t need the high beams, I been up for hours.”

There’s a lot on his mind. Today, finally, is his parole revocation hearing. It will be a long, tense journey through the D.C. criminal justice system. Depending on how things break, it could mean a few more months in prison … or a few more years. During the morning’s preparations and bus trip to D.C., Cedric’s mind locks onto strategic either-ors, multiple-choice answers to hypothetical questions and considerations about how much he’ll be able to lie. It’s not until 9
A.M.
, when he’s led into a waiting area near some hearing rooms in the D.C. jail, that his furious calculations momentarily stop.

“Sherene, baby,” he says, standing there in his orange jumpsuit, sounding more breathless than he’d like to. “Real good to see you.” He bends forward and pecks her on the cheek, smelling some perfume
she’s wearing and feeling dizzy, his just uncuffed hands fumbling forward.

She pulls away, looking at him with mock disapproval, and introduces a tall slender black guy to her left in a black suit and boldly patterned tie.