A Hope in the Unseen (50 page)

He slips off the coat, flings it over the empty chair across from him, and roots around in his pants pocket. On a slip of paper he retrieves is scribbled 1-800-USA-FIND, an organization he saw on one of the shows (Sally or Montel, one of them). You send the organization $80 and they try to find a certain person you’re looking for. When he
jotted it down off the TV, he was thinking of Jamal McCall, his elementary school friend, his first real buddy, who left suddenly after a week at Jefferson. The whole matter is vexing. Here it is, his best month, a time when he’s emerging and finally figuring some things out, and here he’s thinking about going back to find Jamal. How bizarre, he thinks. But, looking at the number, he recalls again going to the porch on U Street, where Jamal lived, and cupping his hands on the cloudy window as he looked in at the vacant rooms. No word, no forwarding address, no good-bye. He shoves the paper back in his pocket, grabs the overcoat, and begins a meandering walk, here and there, stretching for hours. Just walking, trying to keep his bearings through unfamiliar streets, feeling edgy and contemplative and a little wild. At a mom and pop jeweler, he tries on some white gold rings he can’t afford (a nice complement, though, to the pimp coat) and then, at a nearby corner, approaches a man idling at a red light in his cream Infiniti Q30.

“I love that car, how much does it cost?” Cedric asks, approaching the open driver’s side window.

“Umm, about $55,000,” sputters the man, a distinguished, white fiftyish guy with salt-and-pepper hair who then steps on it, as though he’s worried Cedric’s next request will be for the keys. Cedric just watches the rounded back end speed away.

“Wow,” he murmurs, “got to have one of those someday.”

As the afternoon wanes, he circles in a wide arc back toward campus. Reviewing his curious, searching day, he wonders about why he needed to get away on his own and reminisce. After a bit, a line pops into his head that he first heard in high school during one of the many black history months and then had to write an essay about at MIT. Hell, thinking back, he’s probably used this quote in a half-dozen papers. It’s one of those classics from W.E.B. DuBois, the black philosopher and critic, the one about the black man having no “true self-consciousness” but rather a “double-consciousness,” which DuBois says is a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

He chews on this for a while, turning it over in his head, and finds
himself agreeing with the basic idea of blacks having a “double consciousness” but wondering if seeing yourself “through the eyes of others,” which everyone, after all, does to some degree, means you can’t also have a “true self-consciousness.” He feels like he’s getting one of those—a truer, clearer sense of himself—as he finally pushes forward out of his solitude and mistrust, through his thicket of fears and doubts. Part of that process, he figures, must include days like today, where he’s forced to backtrack through a thrift shop of memories where, no doubt, some demons are hiding in the racks. Who knows, he mulls, maybe to slay those demons is the reason he has to keep going back.

He’s getting close to Brown, only six or seven blocks ahead, and up to the left is the Eastside Market, an old, modestly priced independent supermarket, a rarity, that he’s visited a few times to buy food.

Finals will start in a couple of weeks and he figures it’s a good time to load up on provisions, cheap and bulky fare for when he gets hungry, studying late—something to sustain him in a pinch. Walking across the parking lot, he suddenly laughs loud, causing a passing lady to stare. What he really
needs:
Oodles of Noodles. A couple of packages. The dreaded Oodles (a staple to stave off starvation in the lean days of his youth, a dish he swore he’d never, ever buy when he grew up) are what he feels a sudden craving for. He may even down a bowl when he gets back to the dorm. Just thinking about it reminds him of one last thing he’s worked hard
not
to think about lately, and he silently commits to calling his mother, whom he hasn’t talked to since spring break.

Dinnertime is approaching, and East Andrews is bustling, everyone revving up for Saturday night. Cedric, striding through with his bag of groceries, feels curiously renewed from his journey, ready now for almost anything. Balancing the groceries on his knee, the coat on his arm, he grabs the pen dangling from Chiniqua’s memo pad and writes, “Hey, what time’s that party at Harambee tonight? Call me. Cedric.”

The groceries are barely unpacked onto his closet shelves when the phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Cedric? It’s me, Clarence. I’m in Providence.”

“Mr. Taylor?! What are you doing here?”

“I stopped through on my way to the marathon, you know in Boston. I’m so happy I got you.”

They make a plan to meet, and Cedric hangs up, thoroughly astonished. What a day, past and present colliding, and now Clarence Taylor! Fifteen minutes later, on the far side of Brown’s main green, he spots a white Cutlass Ciera and breaks into a trot.

“Cedric Jennings, as I live and breathe,” the teacher shouts.

“Oh Gawwd. Mr. Taylor. I can’t believe you’re here,” Cedric says, panting, and they hug, the student now towering over his old teacher.

“My oh my, you’re really growing up, look at you,” exults Mr. Taylor. Cedric has never seen Clarence in this context—sloppily casual in his hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, and sandals with no socks, far from home and with his wife, who nods politely from the far side of the car.

After Clarence grills him a bit on academics and Cedric talks a little about his searching day, Clarence opens the car door. “I got something for you.” He reaches into the back seat, behind the Styrofoam Gatorade cooler and a bag of pretzels and pulls out a Bible study magazine. “Here, I brought this.”

Cedric looks at it blankly and says earnestly, “I’ll read it as soon as I get back.”

Clarence looks over at his wife and tells Cedric, “We’re going to have to get going soon,” but his visit wouldn’t be complete without a recitation. He’s been saving this one up.

Cedric smiles benignly as Clarence plunges into Romans, chapter 8, verse 35: “Whoooooo,” he intones, “shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’” He pauses for dramatic effect, preparing the punchline. “‘Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.’”

Nodding along with each verse, Cedric knows Mr. Taylor wants him to say something, something profound and scriptural. “Well, Mr. Taylor, you certainly got every word of that one from Romans right,” Cedric says, mostly to fill the silence. “But, you know, I think I like it better when you get a few words wrong, like you used to.” Clarence’s
expectant smile fades a bit, and Cedric says the thing that just dawned on him. “Remember when we were in your classroom that time, me and LaTisha, and she was busting me about putting all my faith in making it to the Ivy League, to a place I’d never seen, where I might not be welcomed? And you said that thing, remember? About faith, you know, how the substance of faith is a hope in the unseen. You botched it and all, but in a good way,” he says as Clarence squints, trying to bring the memory into focus. But Cedric pushes forward—there’s almost no one else he can tell this to. “Well, thing is, I always imagined the unseen as a place, a place I couldn’t yet see, up ahead, where I’d be welcomed and accepted, just for who I am. And I still feel like it is a place, an imagined place, really, either here or somewhere else, that I’ll get to someday. But first, you know, now I realize that there’s work I need to do, too. I need to know—to really know—who I am, and accept who I am, deal with some of my own issues. That’s got to come first, before I can expect other people to accept me. The good thing, though, is that it seems like I’m just now coming into focus to myself—you know, beginning to see myself more clearly.”

Clarence looks at him tenderly, wanting, it seems, to second Cedric’s insight. “The unseen may be a place in your heart,” he says cheerily. “Well, God bless.” They hug again, promise to write, and soon the Cutlass is on its way to Boston and Cedric is strolling buoyantly back toward the dorm. He discards the Bible magazine on a stoop on Brown’s main green—maybe someone else needs it—and looks up, thinking he smells a coming rain.

The party at Harambee House is just getting under way at 10:15 when they arrive: Cedric, Chiniqua, and her black girlfriends from nearby hallways, Julia and Jodie, whom Cedric has gotten to know a bit. Cedric’s outfit is distinctive—gray sweat pants, black Nikes, a plain white T-shirt peeking from under his beige coat, collar up, topped with a leather cap he bought with his mom on parents weekend. With the coat and hat, his ’70s look is wildly inappropriate, as Julia told him it would be. Having finally gotten him to Harambee, Chiniqua, meanwhile, wants to make the most of it, poking at him playfully on the walk over about how there won’t be anywhere in the party room to sit and how he’ll just have to stand against the wall, like a statue, if he
doesn’t want to dance like everyone else. She knows he doesn’t dance, at least not in public, and it would be a stunning added triumph if she could get him onto the floor.

The party’s cover is $3 if you have your Brown ID. Chiniqua, dressed in a white lacy top and tight white slacks, goes in first, followed by Julia, with Cedric lagging behind because all he has is a $5 bill. It’s so early, the guy at the door has almost no singles, so he tells Cedric it’ll cost him five, unless he wants to come back a little later. Grimacing, Cedric mills about the Harambee lobby for a moment, and then tries again, this time arguing passionately, in a completely uncool display, for his $2 until the guy gives up the change.

Inside, the music is blasting, but the room is almost empty. Cedric, surprised to spot a lone white couch in a corner near the door, moves swiftly for it and settles in, glad to find a refuge with a good view. Chiniqua and Julia start dancing on the empty floor, watched by a few people, guys mostly, lining the walls. Chiniqua throws a beckoning look over at Cedric as she spins. He looks away. Dancing is one thing, but being the only guy in the middle of a nearly empty dance floor? Is she kidding? In a moment, though, Cedric’s throat catches as two guys break from the wall and start dancing around the pair, encircling them until the girls eventually turn their backs on each other to face the boys. Cedric feels overmatched. By now, the floor is filling, and after a moment, Chiniqua and Julia are barely visible from his couch-potato perch.

Cedric watches the party unfold, feeling the room’s pounding energy flow through him, while he tries to reconcile himself with crushing ineptness. There’s no way he can compete in this realm, he decides, arching his neck to glimpse Chiniqua in the middle of the floor. He might as well be playing basketball with these guys (another thing he doesn’t do, maybe because, way back, it was expected of him, just like dancing—he gradually thrived by sticking to what was
not
expected of a poor, black, drug dealer’s son). God knows he paid a price for cutting his own solitary path, one he’s still paying. But there’s hope. He knows he’s as coordinated as the next guy, and God knows he’s musical. It will come, in time.

Tonight, though, sitting frozen on the couch in his pimp jacket and
leather hat, he resigns himself to just watching, finally getting to see the mating dance up close, the real deal. By 11:30, the room is dense with bodies. Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity, inducted new members earlier tonight, and the freshly minted brothers, most of them shirtless, charge the room with a raw physicality. Some other boys take off their shirts, too. There’s no alcohol, but there doesn’t need to be. Everyone seems intoxicated with the thumping music and muscle and clean sweat and girls in tight outfits—Cedric can’t stop looking at some of them—touching and being touched as they spin on the packed floorboards.

He’s finally able to watch it all, kids from nice homes and probably two-parent families wearing some of the same stuff he saw Head wearing three years ago, mugging styles and postures that spring from a bleak place none of them would ever dare visit. He starts to see some things more clearly. Like the suburban white kids who could afford to party and experiment in their safe realms, similar privileges were extended to these mostly middle-class blacks, who now can cherry pick some raucous ingredients from the black urban buffet to fire the mix.

What frightened Cedric about this place, what kept him away all year, went beyond a lifetime of admonitions from Bishop Long about black people ruinously giving in to temptation or Barbara’s zero tolerance for alcohol and sexual indiscretion. Those dire warnings don’t really seem to fit here, not with this crowd. No, it was intimidation—these kids intimidated the hell out of him! Even at a distance, even in theory, he was unnerved by the brew of black coolness and youthful achievement, a casual blend that almost mocks the brutal adolescent trade-offs he had to make to get here. He dealt with this crowd somewhat at MIT, black kids who say they’re from New York though they live in Westchester County, black kids with bright futures who are as anxious to co-opt inner-city coolness as the white kids in the unit. The difference is that the black middle-class kids can really pull it off. He feared that, if he got close to Harambee, the undertow would be irresistible and his oaths about integration, about taking the toughest path, mixing with kids from all races and creeds, would give way to a separatist compromise. At Brown, that’s the path of least resistance almost everyone takes. And where would that end? Cedric Jennings as a
middle-class wanna-be, a poor imitation, trying to keep up with doctors’ kids from good high schools who also happen to be black.

As midnight approaches, Chiniqua is gone, having vanished hours ago somewhere in the crowd. A smell of reefer drifts across the room. Cedric shakes his head, remembering the smell from Ballou’s halls, from lost kids who seemed to rely on their pot for basic sustenance and sanity. He surveys the room, looking at the boys jiving in their Hilfiger shirts, all of them playing, dancing forward with an admirable light-footedness. But not him. Maybe someday, he muses, he’ll have a son who will be like that. But, no, not him. Like going to the Underground with the white kids a few days ago, he finds that being here doesn’t alter who he is, that he’s becoming sure enough of himself that he can get right up close, feel the pulse, smell the air, see what there is to see, and not lose himself. He can stay or leave. He can decide, because now he knows what’s here. The choices are all his.