A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN: An American Odyssey
From the Inner City to the Ivy League
By Ron Suskind
Broadway Books, 372 pages, $25
In the opening pages of “A Hope in the Unseen,” Cedric Jennings sits alone, angry and ashamed, in an empty high school chemistry classroom. He is playing hooky from the assembly that will mark him, again, as his school’s highest achiever and, as such, the target of his classmates’ ridicule and hate. Not even the promise of $100, one of the principal’s desperate attempts to flush out the school’s few honor students, can lure Cedric from the computer where, staring into the darkened screen, he berates himself for his cowardice.
It is a painful, surprising scene and the first of many poignant moments in this 16-year-old’s almost unfathomable odyssey from the ghetto of southeast Washington, D.C., to the campus of Brown University.
The elements of this non-fiction narrative, of poor-kid-makes-good-through-faith-and-hard-work, are embedded in the American cultural narrative. They form the predominant mythology of our country as a whole and many of its well-known figures, among them Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who makes a strange and unforgettable cameo appearance in Cedric’s life.
But the story of Cedric Jennings is a peculiarly contemporary and complex version of this tale. He is the out-of-wedlock son of an imprisoned drug dealer and a staunchly religious government worker who has sacrificed virtually every scrap of her own life to win her son the slim chance of escape from the slums where she has raised him.
Cedric’s struggle to make something of himself is hampered not only by the familiar banes of ghetto life- abysmal schools, the persistent threat of violence, the chaotic existence of poverty-but also by more insidious foes. He must contend with well-meaning but ham-handed efforts at affirmative action, his own pride and what the book describes as the “crab/bucket syndrome,” when the rest of the crabs in a bucket try to pull back down the one who tries to climb out.
For Cedric, this means near-constant harassment and bullying by his classmates, even threats at gunpoint. It was this battle that Ron Suskind, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, focused on when he first wrote about Cedric in 1994, after a visit to Frank W. Ballou High School in search of a story about what happens to good students in bad schools.
In two articles that ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, Suskind followed Cedric through his junior year at Ballou and to a prestigious summer program for minority high school students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
While the first part of the book retraces these early footsteps along Cedric’s path, the larger piece travels along the next, even more arduous leg of his journey: Cedric’s disappointing performance and disillusionment at MIT, his graduation from high school and his difficult freshman year at Brown.
What sustains this narrative and distinguishes it from the poverty-lit pack, much of which thins to flimsiness when stretched from article to book, is the emotional richness of Cedric’s struggle and the extraordinary depth of Suskind’s telling of it. His detailed reporting produces a series of exquisite moments that illuminate Cedric’s plight and that of his larger world with shard-sharp clarity. In doing so, he shreds many of the myths about the inner city and the Ivy League.
We see Cedric’s high school history teacher make a show of looking around the classroom before calling upon him, even though he and another student are the only two to show up out of a class of 20. We are held captive as Clarence Thomas, who has summoned Cedric to his Supreme Court office for a pep talk, embarks on an impassioned harangue about race and identity. ” `(Y)ou may find you’re never fully accepted . . ., that you’ve landed between worlds,’ ” he tells Cedric. ” `That’s the way I feel sometimes, even now, and it can make you angry. But you have to channel that anger, to harness it.’ “
The day before classes are scheduled to begin at Brown, a panicked Cedric confronts a familiar but unidentifiable face in the displays at the campus bookstore:
“He looks to his left. Martin Gilbert’s new biography Churchill, A Life piled five feet high, topped by a tilted copy, sticking Churchill’s bulldog mug right in Cedric’s face.
“Oh God, he thinks, I should know who he is. He grabs the book and flips through. `Churchill,’ he whispers after a moment, committing it to memory. `Prime minister of England during World War Two.’ Then he gently replaces the book, looking up to make sure no one has spotted him.”
Despite the lacunas in his education, Cedric propels himself to the Ivy League with an almost fanatical self-discipline and the religious faith that inspired the book’s title. (Interestingly, Suskind does not discuss what prompts Brown University to offer admission to Cedric, itself a tiny but relevant lacuna in the book.)
“A hope in the unseen” is how Cedric’s high school mentor, chemistry teacher Clarence Taylor, mangles a Biblical verse he offers Cedric as inspiration. The teenager later begins to realize that the unseen, which he has always pictured as the place where he would finally find acceptance, may instead be the unfolding of his own heart. ” `(I)t seems like I’m just now coming into focus to myself–you know, beginning to see myself more clearly,’ ” he tells Taylor when the teacher visits him at Brown.
There is no cloudiness in Suskind’s vision of Cedric. He does not shy away from the pricklier aspects of the teenager’s personality, most notably the fierce pride that buoys but also batters him. In his high school commencement address, he hurls back the years of insults with an angry, triumphant speech celebrating his success, but at Brown, that same pride sometimes isolates him from other students, even those who try to make overtures of friendship.
The friction between Cedric and his freshman roommate, a sloppy Massachusetts preppie by the pseudonym of Rob Burton, arises as much from Cedric’s bristliness as the cultural and racial clash between the two. Although Burton plays a fairly minor role in Cedric’s story, he is a fully realized character, from his habitually bare feet, which disgust Cedric, to his final, earnest attempt at reconciliation.
One of this book’s many strengths is its finely shaded, resonant portraits of the people who surround Cedric, among them Chiniqua Milligan–the sole other black resident of Cedric’s dormitory unit and object of his budding affection–and the only other freshman who makes friends with him, Zayd Dohrn. Zayd is the son of Chicago radicals-turned-reformers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and instigator of some of the book’s lighter moments. He makes a determined effort to rebel against his 1960s rebel parents by blithely pursuing women and going hunting with his grandfather, and in one particularly wry scene he cringes in embarrassment when his mother cheerfully curses in public during parents weekend.
But the most remarkable character is Cedric’s mother, Barbara Jennings, who devotes herself from his birth to finding him a way out through education and God, even going on welfare for several years so she can spend more time drilling him with flashcards and shuttling him to museums and church.
After Cedric leaves for Brown, though, she loses the sense of purpose that has sustained her for much of her adult life and slowly disintegrates until, by the time he returns to Washington for the summer, the two of them face eviction from their apartment. That crisis propels the book toward its conclusion, when, in an extraordinarily powerful exchange, the relationship between them begins to shift. This scene, like much of the book, is told from Cedric’s perspective, through the use of internal voice. The technique works exceptionally well in “A Hope in the Unseen,” greatly contributing to the book’s sense of depth and emotion.
Readers who might periodically ask themselves, as I did, “How does he know that?” may want to skip ahead to the author’s note, detailing Suskind’s reporting methods, so they can savor the book in peace. Suskind writes that he turned the manuscript over to Cedric with “a red pen, a three pack of Post-its, and instructions to mark anything attributed to him that wasn’t absolutely accurate.” Most of Cedric’s comments, Suskind adds, concerned his musical tastes.
One intriguing question left unanswered is how Suskind’s presence altered Cedric’s life. Clearly, the teenager’s existence changed dramatically after the articles in The Wall Street Journal and a subsequent segment on ABC-TV’s “Nightline.”
The meeting with Thomas comes after the justice reads about him in the Journal. The articles also inspire a benefactor, who contributes $200 a month toward Cedric’s college living expenses and invites him home for Thanksgiving. But the catalyst of these events merits nothing more than a passing mention or two.
Given Cedric’s extraordinary drive, one can’t help wondering how Suskind’s attention influenced a young man who draws much of his strength from finding, as he puts it, ” `something to push against.’ ” How did knowing that his success or failure was being recorded affect him?
The much larger question of whether Cedric will secure a place in a world where he has scrambled for so long to find a foothold necessarily remains unknown. But the closing scenes of the book, as Cedric finally confronts his father in prison and offers his mother the strength she has so long given him, speak of a young man who has done much more than clamber over the obstacles of poverty, racism and fear toward achievement. He is a young man who is becoming a compassionate, mature adult.
Barbara Jennings says it was a ” `blessed day’ ” when her son met Suskind. That may be true. But all of us are blessed to have met Cedric.
