A Hope in the Unseen Read online

  Chosen as one of the best books of the year

  by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune,

  Washington Monthly, and Booklist

  “Inspiring …. An absorbing and moving portrait of [a] young man’s passage from the turmoil of high school through his … first year at Brown University.”

  —People magazine

  “A tremendous empathetic leap … a story of sheer human grit that should be read by others as example and inspiration.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “A great read … worthy of Tom Wolfe …. A searing expose of racial injustice [that] couldn’t be less didactic …. A moving and meticulous narration of two years in the life of Cedric Jennings.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, front page review

  “An extraordinary, formula-shattering book.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “What distinguishes it from the poverty-lit pack … is the emotional richness of Cedric’s struggle and the extraordinary depth of Suskind’s telling of it … exquisite.”

  —Chicago Tribune, front page review

  “A sweeping book, so powerful it can move a relatively jaded reviewer to tears. It is inspiring enough to justify hope.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Absolutely gripping. A sort of suspense novel of the human psyche … it’s beyond good, it’s really extraordinary.”

  —Walter Kirn, National Public Radio

  “An important, honest, and moving look at an extraordinary passage: a young black man’s rise from the ghetto to the Ivy League.”

  —Providence Journal

  “A classic … simply the best thing I’ve ever read about the confusing thicket of questions surrounding the preferential treatment of disadvantaged blacks …. Before you utter another word about affirmative action—favorable or not—please subject yourself to the pleasurable and edifying experience of reading this superb book.”

  —Washington Monthly

  “An absorbing, painstakingly reported book … it should be required reading in college education and sociology courses.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Jennings’s story is one of triumph within both cultures, black and white …. It is a privilege and an inspiration for readers to accompany Cedric on part of his long, difficult journey to maturity.”

  —School Library Journal

  “A true story that grew out of a series of articles Suskind wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1994. The series won a Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting. It’s a gripping read, but the book is even better.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Every person in America should read this book.”

  —Whole Life Times

  “[An] inspirational story … a remarkably intimate work …. Like the celebrated [Pulitzer Prize—winning] series that is its foundation, Hope is based on extensive interviews, astounding access, and acute reporting. The minutiae of Cedric’s personal history come alive in carefully observed scenes.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A dramatic, heartrending story bound to enrapture reviewers, grab educated readers, and provoke much discussion …. The reader can’t help being moved by Suskind’s novelistic account of the tension between Cedric’s two worlds.”

  —Biography magazine

  “The story is true, although it reads like a gripping novel.”

  —Newsday

  “An enormously hopeful book, a book that cries out to be heard.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Suskind uses his reporter’s skills brilliantly, portraying Cedric’s outer and inner life and making an eloquent though unstated plea for affirmative action. Essential reading that provides some small hope for our social ills.”

  —Library Journal

  “This book is both engrossing and illuminating. The narrative reads a lot like fiction. But it’s not.”

  —San Mateo County Times

  TO CORNELIA,

  FOR HER FAITH IN POSSIBILITY

  I am a part of all that I have met.

  Yet all experience is an arch where-thro’

  Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

  Forever and forever when I move.

  —FROM ULYSSES, ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  CONTENTS

  1. SOMETHING to PUSH AGAINST

  2. DON’T LET THEM HURT YOUR CHILDREN

  3. RISE and SHINE

  4. SKIN DEEP

  5. TO HIM WHO ENDURETH

  6. THE PRETENDER

  7. GOOD-BYE to YESTERDAY

  8. FIERCE INTIMACIES

  9. BILL PAYERS on PARADE

  10. A BURSTING HEART

  11. BACK HOME

  12. LET the COLORS RUN

  13. A PLACE UP AHEAD

  14. MEETING the MAN

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Afterword to the Revised and Updated Edition

  1

  SOMETHING to

  PUSH AGAINST

  A hip-hop tune bursts forth from the six-foot-high amplifiers, prompting the shoulder-snug slopes of black teenagers to sway and pivot in their bleacher seats. It takes only a second or two for some eight hundred students to lock onto the backbeat, and the gymnasium starts to thump with a jaunty enthusiasm.

  Principal Richard Washington, an aggressive little gamecock of a man, struts across the free throw line to a stand-up microphone at the top of the key as the tune (just a check for the speaker system) cuts off. He dramatically clears his throat and sweeps his gaze across the students who happen to be present today—a chilly February morning in 1994—at Frank W. Ballou Senior High, the most troubled and violent school in the blighted southeast corner of Washington, D.C. Usually, he uses assemblies as a forum to admonish students for their stupidity or disrespect. Today, though, he smiles brightly.

  “Ballou students,” he says after a moment, “let’s give a warm welcome to Mayor Marion Barry.”

  The mayor steps forward from a too-small cafeteria chair in his dark suit, an intricately embroidered kufi covering his bald spot. He grabs the throat of the mike stand. “Yes,” he says, his voice full of pride, “I like what I see,” a comment that draws a roar of appreciation. The mayor’s criminal past—his much publicized conviction for cocaine possession and subsequent time served—binds him to this audience, where almost everyone can claim a friend, relative, or parent who is currently in “the system.”

  The mayor delivers his standard speech about self-esteem, about “being all you believe you can be” and “please, everyone, stay in school.” As he speaks, Barry surveys an all-black world: a fully formed, parallel universe to white America. Providing today’s music are disc jockeys from WPGC, a hip-hop station from just across the D.C. line in Maryland’s black suburbs. A nationally famous black rhythm and blues singer—Tevin Campbell—up next, stands under a glass basketball backboard. Watercolors of George Washington Carver and Frederick Douglass glare from display cases. All the administrators are black, as are the ten members of the muscular security force and the two full-time, uniformed cops, one of whom momentarily leaves his hallway beat to duck in and hear the mayor.

  Along the top rows of both sets of bleachers, leaning against the white-painted cinder blocks, are male “crews” from nearby housing projects and neighborhoods in expensive Fila or Hilfiger or Nautica garments and $100-plus shoes, mostly Nikes. Down a few rows from the crews on both sides of the gym is a ridge of wanna-bes, both boys and girls, who feel a rush of excitement sitting so close to their grander neighbors. All during the assembly, they crane their necks to glimpse the crews, to gauge proximity. Next in the hierarchy are the athletes. Local heroes at most high schools but paler chara
cters at Ballou, they are clustered here and there, often identifiable by extreme height or girth. They are relatively few in number, since the school district’s mandatory 2.0 grade point average for athletic participation is too high a bar for many kids here to cross.

  The silent majority at Ballou—spreading along the middle and lower seats of the bleachers—are duck-and-run adolescents: baggy-panted boys and delicately coifed girls in the best outfits they can manage on a shoestring budget. They mug and smile shyly, play cards in class, tend to avoid eye contact, and whisper gossip about all the most interesting stuff going on at school. Hot topics of late include a boy shot recently during lunch period, another hacked with an ax, the girl gang member wounded in a knife fight with a female rival, the weekly fires set in lockers and bathrooms, and that unidentified body dumped a few weeks ago behind the parking lot. Their daily lesson: distinctiveness can be dangerous, so it’s best to develop an aptitude for not being noticed. This, more than any other, is the catechism taught at Ballou and countless other high schools like it across the country.

  As with any dogma, however, there are bound to be heretics. At Ballou, their names are found on a bulletin board outside the principal’s office. The list is pinned up like the manifest from a plane crash, the names of survivors. It’s the honor roll, a mere 79 students—67 girls, 12 boys—out of 1,389 enrolled here who have managed a B average or better.

  With the school’s dropout/transfer rate at nearly 50 percent, it’s understandable that kids at Ballou act as though they’re just passing through. Academics are a low priority, so few stop to read the names of the honor students as they jostle by the bulletin board. Such inattentiveness drives frustrated teachers to keep making the board’s heading bolder and more commanding. Giant, blocky blue letters now shout “WALL OF HONOR.”

  The wall is a paltry play by administrators to boost the top students’ self-esteem—a tired mantra here and at urban schools everywhere. The more practical effect is that the kids listed here become possible targets of violence, which is why some students slated for the Wall of Honor speed off to the principal’s office to plead that their names not be listed, that they not be singled out. To replace their fear with confidence, Principal Washington has settled on a new tactic: bribery. Give straight-A students cash and maybe they’ll get respect, too. Any student with perfect grades in any of the year’s four marking periods receives a $100 check. For a year-long straight-A performance, that’s $400. Real money. The catch? Winners have to personally receive their checks at awards assemblies.

  At the start, the assemblies were a success. The gymnasium was full, and honor students seemed happy to attend, flushed out by the cash. But after a few such gatherings, the jeering started. It was thunderous. “Nerd!” “Geek!” “Egghead!” And the harshest, “Whitey!” Crew members, sensing a hearts-and-minds struggle, stomped on the bleachers and howled. No longer simply names on the Wall of Honor, the “whiteys” now had faces. The honor students were hazed for months afterward. With each assembly, fewer show up.

  Today’s gathering of the mayor, the singer, and the guest DJs carries an added twist: surprise. There was no mention of academic awards, just news about the mayor’s visit, the music, and the general topic of “Stay in School.”

  As the R&B singer takes his bows, Washington steps forward, his trap in place. “I’ll be reading names of students who got straight A’s in the second marking period. I’d like each one to come forward to collect his $100 prize and a special shirt from WPGC. We’re all,” he pauses, glaring across the crowd, “very, very proud of them.” A murmur rumbles through the bleachers.

  Washington takes a list from his breast pocket and begins reading names. He calls four sophomore girls who quietly slip, one by one, onto the gym floor. Then he calls a sophomore boy. Trying his best to vanish, the boy sits stone still in the bleachers, until a teacher spots him, yells, “You can’t hide from me!” and drags him front and center. A chorus of “NEEERD!” rains down from every corner of the room.

  Time for the juniors. Washington looks at his list, knowing this next name will bring an eruption. “Okay then,” he says, mustering his composure. “The next award winner is … Cedric Jennings.”

  Snickers race through the crowd like an electrical current. Necks are craning, everyone trying to get the first glimpse.

  “Oh Cedric? Heeere Cedric,” a crew member calls out from the top row as his buddies dissolve in hysterics.

  Washington starts to sweat. The strategy is backfiring. He scans the crowd. No sign. There’s no way the boy could have known about the surprise awards; most teachers didn’t even know. And Jennings, of all people. Jennings is the only male honor student who bears the cross with pride, the one who stands up to the blows. The only goddamn one left!

  The principal clutches the mike stand, veins bulging from a too-tight collar, and gives it all he’s got, “Cedric Jenningssss … ”

  Across a labyrinth of empty corridors, an angular, almond-eyed boy is holed up in a deserted chemistry classroom. Cedric Jennings often retreats here. It’s his private sanctuary, the one place at Ballou where he feels completely safe, where he can get some peace.

  He looks out the window at a gentle hill of overgrown grass, now patched with snow, and lets his mind wander down two floors and due south to the gymnasium, where he imagines his name being called. Not attending was a calculated bet. He’d heard rumors of possible academic awards. Catcalls from the assemblies of last spring and fall still burn in his memory.

  Off in the distance are skeletons of trees and, behind them, a low-slung, low-rent apartment complex. His eyes glaze as he takes in the lifeless scene, clenching his jaw—a little habit that seems to center him—before turning back to the computer screen.

  “Scholastic Aptitude Practice Test, English, Part III” floats at eye level, atop a long column of words—“cacophony,” “metaphor,” “alliteration”—and choices of definitions.

  He presses through the list—words from another country, words for which you’d get punched if you used them here—and wonders, scrolling with the cursor, if these are words that white people in the suburbs use. A few screens down, a familiar-sounding noun appears: “epistle.” Sort of like “apostle,” he figures, passing by choice “A) a letter” and clicking his mouse on “B) a person sent on a mission.”

  He looks quizzically at his selection. Probably wrong, but he likes the sound of that phrase—“a person sent on a mission.” Sort of like me, he thinks, on a mission to get out of here, to be the one who makes it.

  Cedric Jennings is not, by nature, a loner, but he finds himself ever more isolated, walking a gauntlet through the halls, sitting unaccompanied in class, and spending hours in this room. He is comforted by its orderliness, by the beach-blanket-sized periodic table above his head against the back wall and the gentle glow of the bluish screen.

  He scrolls back to the top of the vocabulary list and reaches for a dictionary on the computer table. The classroom’s occupant, chemistry teacher Clarence Taylor, wanders into the room and registers surprise. “Didn’t go down there, today, huh?” asks Taylor, a bearlike man in his early forties, short but wide all over. “I’m disappointed in you.”

  Cedric doesn’t look up. “They give out the awards?” he asks nonchalantly.

  “Yep,” says Mr. Taylor.

  “Glad I didn’t go, then. I just couldn’t take that abuse again,” he says evenly, this time glancing over at the teacher. “I’ll just pick up the check later. They have to give it to me, you know?”

  Mr. Taylor offers a mock frown, now standing over the boy, eyes wide, brows arched. “That’s not much of an attitude.”

  Cedric flips off the power switch with a long, dexterous finger. “I know,” he murmurs. “I worked hard. Why should I be ashamed? Ashamed to claim credit for something I earned? I hate myself for not going.”

  He sits and stares at the darkened screen. He can hear Mr. Taylor ease away behind him and unload an armful of books on
the slate-topped lab table near the blackboard. He knows the teacher is just fussing, walking through a few meaningless maneuvers while he tries to conjure a worthwhile response to what Cedric just said.

  Mr. Taylor’s moves are familiar by now. The teacher has personally invested in Cedric’s future since the student appeared in his tenth grade chemistry class—back then, Cedric was a sullen ninth grader who had just been thrown out of biology for talking back to the teacher and needed somewhere to go. Taylor let him sit in, gave him a few assignments that the older kids were doing, and was soon marveling at flawless A papers. Taylor took Cedric for an after-school dinner at Western Sizzlin’, and they were suddenly a team.

  In the last two years, Taylor has offered his charge a steady stream of extra-credit projects and trips, like a visit last month with scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He challenges Cedric with elaborate intellectual riddles, withholding praise and daring the pupil to vanquish his theatrical doubting with a real display of intellectual muscle. It’s call and response, combative but productive. Mr. Taylor even sets up competitions among the top students, like a recent after-school contest to see who could most swiftly write every element in the periodic table from memory. As usual, Cedric rose to crush the competition, reeling off all 109 elements in three minutes, thirty-nine seconds.

  Cedric is still staring at the dead screen when he finally hears Mr. Taylor’s squeaky wing tips coming back around the lab table.

  “You see, Cedric, you’re in a race, a long race,” the teacher says as Cedric swivels toward him, his arms crossed. “You can’t worry about what people say from the sidelines. They’re already out of it. You, however, are still on the track. You have to just keep on running so … ”

  “All right, I know,” says Cedric, smirking impatiently. With Mr. Taylor, it’s either a marathon metaphor or a citation from Scripture, and Cedric has heard the race routine many times before. “I’m doing my best, Mr. Taylor. I do more than ten people sometimes.”