A Hope in the Unseen (41 page)

He rouses himself, pushing himself off the locker. Shake it off, he thinks, and he starts to walk again, this time more briskly, trying to affect the purposeful gait that wore down hush puppy soles on this linoleum. He figures he’ll run upstairs to check whether Mr. Taylor might be free.

But on the way to the second floor, he stops. There’s something red on the step. It’s dried and all, but you can tell. He’d heard that two girls got in a knife fight just a few days ago. Must have been here.

He stares at the blood for a long time, he’s not sure how long, until his mind goes blank. Then, Cedric Jennings, salutatorian, class of 1995,
turns silently and descends the stairs, knowing only that there’s no need to ever come back to this place.

L
aTisha Williams looks across the table at Cedric at a home-style restaurant seven blocks south of Scripture Cathedral. She sips her water and says, dreamily, that she still “feels real tingly” and he nods, but not with nearly the enthusiasm that she’d hoped for.

It’s January 22, and Cedric just took LaTisha to the Sunday afternoon service at Scripture. In the midst of whooping frenzy, LaTisha got the Holy Spirit.

Well, she may have, anyway. She herself isn’t exactly sure, so she decides to talk a little more about how it felt going up on stage and having Bishop Long strike her on the forehead. What’s indisputable is that she was up there five minutes or more, feeling faint, crying and waving her hands, sighing, “Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus,” over and over, while Long’s deputies held her up.

“All I know,” she says, “is it was such an amazing feeling.”

Cedric listens to her with an almost clinical detachment. “Generally speaking,” he notes, “when people get the Holy Spirit, their whole life changes, with them getting settled and feeling this kind of bliss all over—and it lasts a while, at least a day and usually a few days. I just remember from when it happened to me when I was thirteen.”

“Well, isn’t it different for everybody?” she says, suddenly feeling sour. “Isn’t it a personal thing?”

“Oh yeah, no doubt,” he says, giving a little ground. “Look, what I’m saying is that, clearly, something powerful happened to you up there—I’m just not sure if the Holy Spirit actually entered your body or not.”

A cheeseburger with fries is slid before her, a breaded catfish with salad before him, and she lets the issue of spiritual authenticity lie, at least for now. They quietly eat, saying little.

It’s a day of high hopes for LaTisha. She’d never been to Scripture before but long anticipated going. She knows the church is at the center of Cedric’s life and, in some ways, holds a key to his drive, to his sense of mission.

She found she missed him more than she expected when he left for college and, in the weeks between phone calls to Providence, often thought about why. Their bond, she decided, was both more and less than a traditional romance. While they were never officially dating, or each others’ “boo” (as she sometimes joked with him over the phone), he was, clearly, a focus of her life. She’d spent years uncovering his young, black, male minefields—the array of buried explosives so many boys at Ballou seemed to carry about issues of trust and respect, about achievement and toughness and manhood. And, in that often exhausting, day-to-day effort, she’d inadvertently invested her heart.

Between bites, LaTisha breaks the silence by asking what he’s been doing for the three weeks of winter break, why he didn’t call. He offers no explanation other than saying he’s been “just sitting around the apartment, watching videos” and that he’s been getting up early every weekday morning—about 5
A.M.
—to watch a show on local cable where a math professor, standing at a blackboard, goes through a college-level calculus course.

Feeling like she might as well confide in him, she’s candid about her problems at UDC and how she’ll just take two classes next semester and start working. She already has something lined up in the mail room of United Communications, the newsletter company, right next to Phillip Atkins. “You know,” she says, trying to sound self-reliant, “I could use the money.”

He nods, like he’s sympathetic, but she’s sure she detects an appraising look, something she hasn’t seen from him before.

By the time dusk arrives, both are back at Scripture in metal folding chairs set up in long rows across the basement for a smallish prayer meeting of about eighty. Bishop Long, dressed casually in slacks and a yellow sport shirt, talks across a wide range of topics with animated enthusiasm, joking, telling stories, loosely quoting Scripture. He talks about how ladies, with “figures like Coke bottles, sometimes get dressed for church like they’re going to a show” and how people should look “presentable coming to church, if that’s within their power, but not be showy, trying to turn heads.”

LaTisha listens, arms folded, slumped in her chair. Cedric leaves for
Brown tomorrow, and this day didn’t turn out quite like she’d hoped. Sure, at Scripture she felt a surge of something—a taste, at least, of the steady, spiritual energy she’s so long detected in Cedric. Thinking ahead, she decides that she’ll call Barbara in a few weeks and maybe come back here for another visit to church, this time with her.

As for her relationship with Cedric, this special day is rapidly feeling like a disappointment. She purses her lips, trying to assess matters: she knows she’s a big-hearted person, she knows she’s been there for him when no one else was—and would be again in a moment, if he’d let her.

She looks over as he listens raptly to Long, even though he told her on the way back from the restaurant that his enthusiasm for church and the unquestioned power of faith is slowly ebbing.

If he’s having some doubts, she mulls, maybe she could find her faith and help
him
. She decides she’ll pray for him, but the idea makes her remember how she used to pray at her old church that God would steer her to a boy, any boy, who would be her friend. She hadn’t thought about all that in more than a year, or the adjoining recollection: her prayer that Cedric was the one. And, as LaTisha’s mind wanders backward, her chin comes to rest against her breastbone’s high ridge, and her eyelids drift shut.

Almost an hour later, at 9:30, she feels a nudge from Cedric. The service is over. Time to get back home. She fights to rouse herself from a deep sleep, and they wander quietly toward the front of the church to catch a ride home with another congregant at tonight’s service.

LaTisha, sifting through a jumble of emotions and knowing their time is short, tries to quickly engage him, criticizing the last thing she heard Long say before she dozed. “I don’t agree,” she says, “that you always have to be looking your best at church, dressing up and all. Everybody, whether it’s a bum or whatever, should be welcome here—it’s the Christian way, it’s God’s will.”

They both slip into the car, ignoring the driver, as their discussion of this obscure point drifts into discord. As LaTisha turns from her front seat to continue the debate, Cedric fires from the back with zeal: “It’s not what he said, LaTisha! Bishop Long said you should look as good as
you are able—without being provocative or flashy—because this, after all, is a house of God.”

“Don’t worry, I hear what you’re saying and all,” she retorts, talking fast and feeling, at this instant, that she’s not to be trifled with. “My point is different. My point is simple. In the supposedly perfect world of the church, it shouldn’t matter how you look, or what you wear. If you’re fat or skinny or come wearing a Hefty bag. Look at Jesus, look what he wore, how he looked. If you’re a person of God, it just don’t matter!”

Cedric glares at her as the car snakes toward Southeast: “You don’t understand anything, LaTisha. He’s saying you take care of yourself. All right?!”

There’s no controlling it now. Both are screaming at each other, regret and anger gushing out, until desperation creeps into LaTisha’s shriek: “It don’t matter how you look, Cedric—it’s what’s inside, the spirit in you. That’s what matters, that’s what matters!”

But he’s yelling too—even louder—and suddenly she feels herself being overwhelmed by a ferocity she’s never seen in him: “Listen to me! He’s saying you don’t let yourself go! All right?! You make yourself look as good as you can! You hear me? What I’m telling you—you just don’t let yourself go!”

They fall silent, and she realizes that this shouting match has nothing to do with Bishop Long. It’s about the two of them, offering a glimpse at how Cedric must see her now. Sitting silently, exhausted from the screaming, she thinks back on that appraising look at dinner. Yes, it was cool and distant, a look of judgment, sizing her up as an overweight, clinging black girl with few prospects and regret growing like kudzu, stuck, maybe forever, in Southeast D.C. Which is, after all, what she is. But still, she hates that any of that matters, that those circumstances mean anything. Cedric used to know that they didn’t—none of them—back in the days he could look right inside of her and see all that was good. She glances at him in the rearview mirror and can make out the side of his face in the passing streetlights. He seems expressionless, gazing out the front window, unaffected. And, as the car twists toward Anacostia to take LaTisha home, she forces herself to
recognize that Cedric Jennings really doesn’t live here anymore. He’s just passing through.

T
he auditorium is casually filling when Cedric arrives, a fresh notebook in hand, and glances down at his imitation DKNY wristwatch. Great, a few minutes early, he thinks. He flops into the aisle seat of a long, empty row of worn oak chairs, bolted onto the sloping concrete, and considers, with some astonishment, how happy he is to be back at Brown.

Being here makes him feel settled and curiously disconnected—like he’s very much on his own but now more comfortable with it. Looking back, the month at home was nothing like he’d expected. Sure, there was an initial, warm blast to the senses when he first returned in mid-December—the smell of air freshener in the bathroom, the taste of the fried chicken Barbara made on his second night back, the feel of his mattress, with dips and gullies in just the right places—but then it all felt too familiar, lending a dull tension to his drifting, uneventful days in the apartment. Infrequent outings—to church, mostly, and one small family gathering at his grandmother’s house—only ended up making him feel more obtuse, as people he’d sometimes known his whole life asked off-target, generally uninformed questions about his new life in Providence.

His new life in Providence? He considers the phrase and grunts a laugh that echoes faintly across the empty seats. He’s noticed a jocular, familial air to the hallways of East Andrews, a feeling (more relief than resignation) that this place, in some official way, has now become home for all of them. At least that’s the way it felt when everyone returned and began hugging and talking excitedly, laughing at nothing.

Cedric’s shoot-low curriculum, born of fear last fall, was a onetime deal. If nothing else, his fabrications at church and at school over his nonexistent grades confirmed what he’d already figured: he can’t take everything pass/fail ever again. This semester he’ll take higher level classes for grades. He also knows he won’t get the benefit of the doubt that many professors extend in the first few months of freshman year.
This semester, he mulls during a last moment before his morning class starts, everything is about to “get real.”

Cedric squints to get a better take on the tiny, distant figure of professor Billy Wooten, just now adjusting the podium microphone. He eventually makes him out as a thoroughly average white, middle-aged guy of average height, with a conventionally professorial demeanor and an unremarkable lecturing style—all of it squeezed into a standard-issue tweed jacket.

“Welcome,” says the distant figure, “to Elementary Psychology, the introduction to mind and behavior.”

Cedric opens his notebook, pulls out a blank sheet of paper, and poises his pen as Professor Wooten describes what will transpire over the next fifteen weeks. It’s the fabled freshman survey course: a bread-and-butter staple of college. Though Tom James’s History of Education was a survey course, there were no tests; it was small enough that Professor James could take a special interest in Cedric, and, most important, it covered areas that allowed Cedric to indulge his passionate perspectives on race and education for credit.

Half an hour into today’s lecture, Cedric can already feel the difference. He’s written down a slew of loaded terms, from
sensation
to
perception
to
interpersonal attraction
. He glances over at the syllabus, just passed out. There are two multiple-choice midterms accounting for a big chunk of the grade and then a multiple-choice final. A once-a-week lab section will look at methodologies to study these mysterious terms. Lots and lots of terms. He looks up as Professor Wooten prepares to show some slides and instructs a teaching assistant to dim the lights. Sitting in the shadows, Cedric realizes that, in here, he’s faceless, just a number, like a walking, breathing SAT score in Nikes. Walking out into the late January sun a few minutes later, he makes a mental note to get that textbook—today!—and start reading it, cover to cover.

Going from class to class over the coming day, the semester’s lineup takes shape. In the Calculus 10 class, he scans the syllabus and sees some material he covered at MIT and plenty that he didn’t. The teacher is a wiry, awkward, fast-talking Ph.D. candidate named Peter Berman, an
oddity among the mostly Asian grad students who teach this course. The class, though, is almost identical to last semester’s: a diverse crowd of mostly nonmath majors, many of whom are expecting to use this class toward a major in one of the sciences. Surveying the room, Cedric decides to display his mastery and answers a question about inverse trigonometric functions. He can feel the eyes of other kids sizing him up. It feels good, so he answers another. A few minutes later, his arm goes up to nail a third.

He knows he’s showing off, but it feels wonderful, a cooling salve to ease his fear of being revealed as academically unworthy. As Berman scribbles ahead toward logarithmic functions, Cedric wonders if he’s wrong to be so proud, and his mind slips back to something Long had said a few weeks ago in a Sunday sermon about the sin of pride, one of Bishop’s favorite subjects. “He that is of a proud heart stirreth up strife,” Cedric recalls Long commanding, quoting Proverbs 28:24, “but he that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat.” Where, he wonders for the umpteenth time, does using one’s talents to bring “glory onto God” end and the much maligned “pridefulness” begin? He hauls out the threadbare response he’s been dragging around for years: that everything you are comes from God, that He deserves credit for it all. Obviously. God created everybody, and all the black winners on the Oscars and Grammies and MTV awards are always thanking God for everything they’ve accomplished, like they’re not allowed to take any credit for themselves lest other blacks jump on them for being haughty. But if God created everyone, Cedric mulls, tapping his pencil eraser on the desktop, what ultimately differentiates the winners from the rest? Take the kids who made it to Brown. Some are people of faith, most are not. But, one thing he’s noticed: very few of them arrived by simply putting their trust in God and praying everything would work out. Took a lot more than that.