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T A B L E++T A L K

Is it better to have one child, or more? Join the discussion in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

A melody of his own making
By Beth Kephart
My child needs me too much
(08/21/98)

First family on the couch
By Lori Leibovich
Therapists analyze the Clintons
(08/20/98)

An affair to remember
By Nell Bernstein
President Clinton is trying desperately to salvage his reputation. Monica Lewinsky has lost hers forever
(08/20/98)

Clinton's silvery web of words
By Katie Roiphe
Once again, the president teased us and left us hanging
(08/19/98)

Finding your inner ape
By Polly Shulman
The books in Peter Dickinson's children's adventure series "The Kin" not only look at what life was like for the first humans -- they also explore what makes us human
(08/18/98)

BROWSE THE FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Black like ( white ) me

BY JANET McDONALD | Few journeys are as confusing, enraging and potentially rewarding as kicking your way out of the airless box that is America's underclass. I know because I have done it. "A Hope in the Unseen" tells the story of how Cedric Jennings, a bright senior at a failing high school in Southeast Washington, D.C., manages through sheer will -- and with a couple of helping hands along the way -- to make it to the Ivy League. One of those helping hands came from the book's author, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal reporter whose Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on the teen led to the book.

Suskind spent two and a half years observing Cedric's life as it unrolled -- and at times unraveled -- in school, at home, in church, in a disastrous college prep program at MIT and finally at Brown University. His book shows Cedric's mother, Barbara, as a powerful force behind her son's drive to succeed -- a woman who, with few realistic possibilities left for herself, put all her hopes and dreams in him. Cedric's father, Cedric Gilliam, is a drug abuser who is in prison. The book takes the reader along on Cedric Jennings' poignant adventure, and in doing so puts a human face on the affirmative action debate and resolves it: Cedric makes it because he is given the chance he so clearly craves and deserves; the scores of Cedrics left to flounder in troubled schools must also deserve that chance.

Reading "A Hope in the Unseen" was for me a Clintonesque "I feel your pain" experience. Like Cedric Jennings, I grew up in an inner-city ghetto -- in my case a Brooklyn public housing project, rife with drug abuse, violence and despair, in the '70s. Although uneducated, my parents were as determined to send me to college as was Cedric's mother. Fortunate enough to have had a bookish bent, I too was placed in special classes for promising students and suffered the ridicule of my peers.

The loneliness Cedric feels as one of a handful of top students at Frank W. Ballou Senior High School is deftly rendered by Suskind. I felt disheartened to see that so little has changed from the time I set out on the same path as Cedric many years ago. Then, as now, honor students in tough inner-city schools are viewed with suspicion and contempt. The reader witnesses the ordeal of a quiet, studious boy in a school with a 50 percent dropout rate, where gang members, real and wannabe, hold the highest status. It is not surprising that a good student appears to be emulating something foreign to that kind of environment -- something nerdy, something white.

The book opens with Cedric hiding alone in an empty chemistry room in Ballou High School to avoid the mockery that will inevitably follow his being cited for academic achievement at an assembly. "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 last spring and fall still burn in his memory." The throat-tightening fear that one feels in one's own neighborhood, a place that should feel like home, comes across all too effectively. The menacing gang members in school and dangerous drug dealers just outside leave Cedric few oases of peace other than home, empty classrooms or church.

I disagree with the book's suggestion that it is easier on a bright schoolgirl to be seen as a "goody" or a "whitey," however. The emotional pain is just as acute and the threat of physical violence for thinking you're "all that" just as real. In fact, reading about Cedric's fear of identity loss if he went to college made me feel as if I were reading my own memoir. My older sister had taunted me for years because of my stellar school record. She insisted I was just a step away from "white," by which she meant corny, unhip and altogether laughable. By the time I reached college age, I was truly afraid college would transform me into that thing of dread, a white girl -- so much so that I confided those fears to my black college advisor, who reassured me that I would remain myself.

N E X T+P A G E: Failure at MIT