A Hope in the Unseen (33 page)

“Idas Daniel,” he says, giving Cedric an overly hard handshake. “I think we’re in good shape.” Cedric had heard about Daniel from someone in minimum last year, and Sherene had to pay him $300 in advance to handle this hearing—something she’s complained mightily about. The lawyer loops a long arm around Cedric’s shoulder and starts whispering something about dirty urine and various D.C. drug treatment programs and how Cedric should keep quiet in the hearing, but Cedric barely hears. His head is buzzing. He thinks about how a hit of heroin would be bliss at this moment, just to ease him out. But there’s no time to think, or talk, or even hug Sherene again. Cedric Gilliam, 158706, is the first hearing scheduled this morning.

A guard leads the trio into a tiny cork-walled room where a leggy black woman in a short skirt sits next to a fortyish Hispanic guy in a brown suit. The guy must be Enrique Rivera, the parole board member, Cedric figures, and the woman is clearly some sort of corrections assistant who’ll implement whatever Rivera decides.

Rivera? Rivera. His mind races. Inmates pass time discussing the board’s five members, analyzing their tics and prejudices to make informed predictions about what might happen in these tiny hearing rooms. The inmate handicapping of Rivera: he’s supposed to favor Hispanics over blacks. There are no cordialities, and Cedric can’t meet Rivera’s gaze as he sidesteps through the doorway and sits. The leggy woman begins reciting Cedric’s criminal history and various incarcerations, highlights from the forearm-thick folder, or “jacket,” on inmate 158706. He already knows every word of that file—every arrest record, court filing, psychological assessment, and rendition of his troubled family history.

His mind wanders, flipping backward until he fixes on something from way back, thirty years at least, that’s always bugged him. A lady from child welfare visited his house and wrote that Maggie, his mother, was a “bitter, discontent, distraught individual who took out her frustrations
on the children with various forms of rejecting behavior.” It’s in a report he once read. The social worker added that Maggie encouraged authorities “to ‘put the boy away,’ with institutionalization being viewed by her as the only meaningful alternative for her son.” He always remembers that, every word.

The leggy woman is almost up to the present, talking about how Cedric checked into drug detox in April, was given a last chance to stay clean by his parole officer, then failed the urine test in June.

“The basic case,” says Daniel, “is my man couldn’t get off the stuff.” Rivera nods along, and they discuss how hard it is to place an inmate in one of District’s crowded drug treatment programs. Cedric watches the men chat, chummy and complacent, his eyes darting from one face to the other.

“I’d like to say that the violation committed by me was wrong!” he blurts out, drawing Rivera’s gaze. The man stares at him, saying nothing, and Cedric starts rambling. “I maintained a job, cutting hair, a regular job … and tried to clean myself up … but, you know, being incarcerated, it’s a point of fact, that the Department of Corrections facility is drug infested … and that’s why I’m asking for an inpatient program … where I can get away from everything that’s a problem for me.”

He stops abruptly. He knows he should have let Daniel do the talking instead of babbling on, looking like what he is—a desperate man not ready to be on the outside. Daniel murmurs something compensatory, trying to redirect, but Rivera is just looking at Cedric, like he’s trying to dig inside him with his eyes. This time, at least, Cedric looks back, but—goddammit!—his left eye starts to twitch and he can’t stop it. Fighting the spasm, he hunches forward, looking like he’s going to say something, and everyone seems to wait on him. He looks once around the room. “I’m basically asking to be given another chance,” he croaks finally, feeling the breath go out of him.

Rivera smiles a sort of melancholy smile, a smile of pity. A moment later he’s making a recommendation that Cedric go back to Lorton until his needs can be assessed and a slot in a one-year inpatient drug treatment program can located.

And then it’s over. Leaving the room, Cedric nods thankfully toward Rivera. He feared it would be worse, that he’d be reprimanded and sent back to serve more time. But this is different, an order that he be placed in a treatment program—the kind of program he’s needed—soon as that can be arranged. Daniel, grinning and jokey, huddles with Cedric in a foyer area outside the hearing room.

“They’re gonna have a real tough time finding a year-long treatment program, with cutbacks and all. But that’s what Rivera will recommend anyway. So when they talk to you at your assessment at Lorton, be flexible that six months is what you really need. It’ll be easier for them to find you a bed that way.” Cedric listens, trying to find in Daniel’s tone and inflection a confirmation that this was a victory. Yes, it is a victory, he decides, and spots a guy he knows from minimum security in an orange jumper, waiting for his hearing. “Joe, Joe, can I have a cigarette?” he asks, and he snatches the cigarette the guy passes to him, artfully slipping it into his breast pocket. Of course, the cig’s not free—nothing is around here—and Joe wants some intelligence about Cedric’s hearing, about which board member is on today.

“It’s Rivera, and I was worried, because he supposedly favors the Puerto Ricans. But he was okay. For me, it was dirty urine, and it’ll mean six months, I figure,” he says, venturing a prediction. “Yeah, six months, tops, in an inpatient drug treatment program, and then I’ll be out.”

It’s time for Daniel and Sherene to be led out, and Cedric moves toward her quickly, grabbing her hand. “You’ll party tonight, be celebrating and all?” he asks, smiling, and kisses her cheek again. She pulls away, but not briskly like before, and purses her lips, playfully. He wants confirmation. “Well, will you be?”

“Okay,” she says, giving in. “I guess so.” Savoring this small victory, he nods. “Well, then, I can think about you being out, having fun.”

It only takes a few weeks back at Lorton for Cedric Gilliam to feel mocked by the idea of a celebration. Celebration? Celebrating what? he mulls, lying on his cot one evening as November approaches. He’s checked on the availability of one-year inpatient slots. It’s a joke. Inmates
are waiting three months just to be assessed for placement, and then it’s another six months, maybe even longer, to find a bed. Rivera ordered something that’s not findable. Cedric’s not going anywhere.

Sherene visited yesterday and they just sat on the little, mustard-colored plastic chairs in the visitation hall—a big gymnasium—not saying much. He tried to describe to her how dangerous this place is, how there was a stabbing a few nights ago, and how he feels like he’s lost his bearings. These young guys, some doing endless time on three-strike felonies or murder raps, are just looking to exact some punishment, to take it out on somebody. A few weeks ago, they had four stabbings in one night. Guys are making shanks out of toothbrushes, bits of metal, table legs. Some guard got busted for smuggling in guns. Maybe being out for almost a year made him soft, maybe it’s just age and fatigue. But he’s not sure he has the energy anymore to put up a deterring facade, to spot potential threats and fend off attacks. All he knows is that he’s tired of always being jumpy, with no trusted guys over here to back him up and no connections to score drugs.

Sherene didn’t seem to want to hear any of it. She just kept looking up and down the rows of facing chairs, with inmates hugging and kissing the girls visiting them, people wrapped up in each other like pretzels.

“Aren’t you happy to see me, after I’ve come all the way out here? What, you’re just not in the mood?” she asked, after a long silence. He just grumbled. It’s hard to get “in the mood,” he mulled darkly, when you know you’ll have to leave the gym floor in a few minutes, walk behind a screen on the stage, and take off all your clothes. You want a cold shower? Try having some guard running his rubber-gloved hands all over your cold body and then ordering you to bend over and part your cheeks. The only thing worse than having it done is having to talk about it. So he said nothing. Sherene left in a snit, and he, of course, walked behind the screen to peel off his sky-blue jumpsuit.

The days start to run together. There’s nothing to do here. Movement is tightly restricted, unlike at minimum, where you could get a pass to go to the library, or some class, drug treatment counseling, job training, or whatever. A little excursion like that can make a whole day. Here, there are no programs to speak of. Cedric spends every day
bumping around cell block 18, a fifty-man open dorm area. Once in a while he plays Scrabble with a guy named Zack. But they’re not all that close; Cedric doesn’t even know why he’s here or for how long. On good days, he might score a newspaper to read—that helps—but they’re scarce.

It’s raining hard today, a day in early November, cutting off the option of going outside into a small courtyard near the cell block. There’s nothing to do, simply nothing, and Cedric bums a piece of notebook paper from a guy across the room. He takes it to a bare table near the blaring TV, pulls a plastic pen from his hip pocket, and sits on a metal chair with a torn fabric seat.

He sits there a long while, staring into the whiteness. He can’t remember the last time he did this. Years, at least. He draws a line on his palm, to make sure the pen is working, and then presses it to the paper.

He reads over what he’s written a dozen times.

He stops. No need to rush it. He wants to get the words just right. Thinking back on that Princeton thing—maybe it
was
more than six years ago—sends him into a minefield of memory and regret. It ends further back than he usually reminisces, to when he was just a kid—
maybe thirteen—and his father, Freddie, visited from Philadelphia. Hasn’t thought about that forever. That’s what getting depressed will do, he thinks, unearth stuff you forget about. The old man had disappeared when he was seven. Left town, no one knew where he’d gone. Then all of a sudden, he’s there, coming by the house and saying he’s in Philly now, like no one ever got beaten and nothing ever happened. He took Cedric down to a flea market on H Street. Bought him a round cap, checked, with a nice fabric, that kind of hung to one side. It was the early ‘60s, and that was a very cool hat. Had to cost $10. Then he was gone, just like that—no forwarding address, just vanished. Whole thing made his mom crazy, like he’d never seen. She threw the hat away in some garbage someplace, where he couldn’t find it. God, he loved that fuckin’ hat.

The buzzer rings for dinner. Guys start easing toward the locked cell block door, slowly lining up to go to the mess. Cedric just sits, taking his time, easing out of the recollection. Thirteen years old, just a little shit. He shakes his head. That was about the time he started getting in trouble.

He looks down at the letter’s two scratchy paragraphs. Who’s he to be writing this letter, he muses, a letter from prison to an Ivy League college; sure they don’t get much jail mail in the Ivies. He reads it again, slowly, thinking that the tone of it bothers him a little. It’s sort of apologetic, like he’s apologizing to Lavar.

He frowns and folds the letter into thirds, then again lengthwise, and roughly shoves it in his pocket.

C
edric Jennings stares at his midterm paper in Calculus and finishes off a third box of Golden Grahams for lunch at Vernon Wooley Dining Hall, called the VeeDub. The grade is a 94. He looks up. Chiniqua and her roommate, Maura, are sitting across from him. He shows them the paper. They’re effusive in their praise.

But it doesn’t cheer him. He’s told Chiniqua, at least, that this is just one level above beginner math and that he shot low out of fear.

Still, when she smiles at him, he smiles back. The two girls pile
plates and glasses on their trays to go, and he pours another box of Golden Grahams. It’s a cereal he ate a lot of at home, sometimes when there wasn’t much else to eat. In the last couple of days, since midterms ended, he’s been eating a lot of it.

“Cedric, how many bowls you gonna eat?” Chiniqua says.

“As many as it takes,” he says, trying to make her laugh.

“Takes for what?” she says, rising with her tray. And then she bends in close to whisper, “You should eat some real food.”

A frenzy of studying for mid-October’s midterms gave Cedric a break from the fixating strife with Rob. Everyone, Rob included, had other things to worry about. Cedric, nonetheless, did most of his studying in Rockefeller Library to avoid his roommate. Not that he had that much studying. Calculus was a walk in the park, and his only other midterm test was in Spanish.

He didn’t need to worry about bumping into Rob in room 216. His roommate is all but living on the third floor, dividing evenings among rooms of various friends.

Cedric—with sound strategic instincts from a lifetime of confrontation—forces himself not to retreat from the group of white guys so he can’t be characterized for everyone by Rob. He tries to stick with the group and shake off his confusion at their strange habits. For one, the white guys are more physical and affectionate toward one another than he’s used to seeing among the black kids from high school, who were so wrapped up with burnishing their hard exteriors. Black kids from his school and neighborhood might have hung together endlessly but rarely showed the sort of self-deprecating, carefree vulnerability that’s common here. He’s not sure how to react. No one here is boastful. They all make fun of themselves—and each other—though their underlying confidence never seems jilted. It’s the precise opposite of what has passed for normal his whole life, one spent around those whose underlying self-confidence was easily punctured.