I headed toward a group of tall buildings. Projects. I loitered there for a while, feeling reckless. At last, a young guy approached. “What you need?” His eyes scanned the street. I felt awkward. “Uh, I got twenty bucks.” I thought saying “got” and “bucks” would establish me as a homegirl. I might as well have shouted, “Excuse me. I don’t wish to be presumptuous, but do you have any heroin for sale, and if so, could you provide me with the quantity/price breakdown?” He smiled. “Where you from, New Jersey?” The ultimate, humiliating insult. “No. I’m from Brooklyn.” “Yeah? You seem like you from New Jersey. You sure you not from New Jersey?” His words meant something was terribly wrong with my presentation, that I appeared middle class, maybe even whitegirlish.

A stocky woman with bad skin and glazed eyes approached with an air of no-nonsense urgency. “You straight?” she asked. “What you need?” “Lemme git a dime.” He didn’t ask her if she was from New Jersey. He eased something into her hand as she slipped a bill into his and she split. Straight. Dime. I filed away the new vocabulary words in my memory. The dealer turned his attention back to me; I was ready. “Lemme git two dimes.” He slipped two glassine envelopes into my hand, and I fumbled a twenty into his. “I’m on this corner every day, so look for me when you come back. If you don’t see me, ask anybody for Eddie.” I was so pleased to feel part of this new group that I almost forgot to ask Eddie my second question. “Uh, do you know where I can get …” Another vocabulary lapse. “You need works? See that building over there? Go to 1-B. That’s Pops’ crib. He’s cool.”

My naoveti was astonishing. I was a Vassar freshman buying heroin in Harlem, without benefit of white-skin privilege, wealth, or family ties. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was arrested in his BMW a few years later doing the same thing, he wasn’t prosecuted. I, on the other hand, would have been sent straight up the river, not back to Vassar, but to prison. My existential explanations of tribal yearnings and identity conflicts would have fallen on deaf police ears, as would have my explanation that it was my first time. I was a classic no-common-sense, all-book-learning casualty. Ernest and Ann were doing it, as were a whole lot of my project friends. I wanted to belong, too, make my last stab at being truly project before my inevitable transformation into Straightback Sally.

I followed Eddie’s directions to the low-rise tenement building and tapped softly at 1-B. A dark eye peered through the peephole. Four locks unlocked, clicking one after another. Absolutely anyone could have been on the other side of the door, but my only concern was the embarrassment I felt. The door opened. Before me stood an old man with black skin and white hair who looked like anyone’s sweet old grandpa, except for the enormous revolver protruding from his waistband. Speech failed me. I felt too ashamed to ask something so awful of someone who could be my grandfather. Besides, he might scold and lecture me about the folly of my ways. “Don’t be shy with ol’ Pops, honey, come on in and make yourself comfortable. No need to be shame with me. You want some works?” I sat on the couch, wanting to throw myself into his grandfatherly embrace and tell him how unhappy I was. Why wasn’t he trying to talk me out of it, tell me I was hurting myself, that I should go back to Vassar and stay put? “How many you want, honey? One? Two? They a dollar a piece.” I read the marking on the big cardboard box of syringes: “Harlem Hospital.” It was a depressing scene, the two of us there, grandfather and granddaughter, with that box.

I wasted no time making a spectacle of myself back at school. To be able to use the works, I had to overcome the fear of needles I’d developed during my annual elementary-school inoculations. But my fear of death stopped me from mainlining, which was how most junkies I knew lived, and died. Instead, I just stuck the needle in my thigh. Most of the time, though, I opted for a less life-threatening route. I scooped the white powder onto the tip of a fingernail file and brought it to my nose.
Bitterness flooded the back of my throat. A warm drowsiness relaxed my body. I cruised over to Kendrick House, where I performed every attention-grabbing act imaginable, short of wearing a T-shirt with “Hey, look at me!” printed on it. I paraded around, wildly exaggerating every sensation. I slumped in a high-backed chair in the middle of the lounge, leaned against the fireplace, knees slowly bending, did a slow-motion doze in the recreation room. I wanted everyone to know that I was not like them, and would not become like them.

It wasn’t long before I was known for having “a problem.” As much as I pursued my own isolation, I loved the attention and solicitude I was getting. “How long you been on that stuff?” I was asked. “Oh, a long time. I’m from the projects, you know,” I lied. I told myself that my act affirmed my project-girl identity and proclaimed my solidarity with the downhill plungers I left in Brooklyn. In reality, my actions bespoke the distorted reasoning of a guilt-ridden survivor.

Most people shook their heads in disapproval but said nothing. Harriet, the black belle from Tennessee, had plenty to say, however. Her clothes and manner commanded deference. I could see she was someone used to the best. She wanted to “try it” but needed to know it was “good quality.” I assured her it was top-notch. Eddie had said so. She wasn’t entirely convinced. “It’s not cut with any shit? I mean, I won’t get sick, or jump out the window, will I?” Sniffing it was perfectly safe, I asserted. “Okay. Can I do some with you? But don’t tell.” She didn’t want me in her room, so we went to the Early Prison Cell [McDonald's dorm room]. Brenda was out, as was often the case. I suspected it was because of me, but she said she just had lots to do. Harriet asked when the rest of my things were going to be delivered. “Never,” I said, chuckling. We got high. A few moments passed. Harriet had a puzzled look on her face. “I don’t know, I feel kind of weird. I had some once before, but it felt different, What kind of coke is this?” “Coke? That was heroin … I thought you knew.” The belle bristled. “Damn, girl! Nobody takes that!” After that incident, whenever we crossed paths we would look at each other and burst into laughter. The reaction “across the street” was altogether different. A couple of my white friends, hell-bent on waging their own brand of rebellion at Mom’s alma mater, were desperate to experiment. Taking “smack,” as they called it, with a black girl from the ghetto was the kind of thing that made breathtaking journal entries. And all within the safety of the ivy-wrapped walls of Vassar. Wasn’t that what college was about, the enriching experience of meeting people from different backgrounds?
A wealthy friend from the Upper East Side begged me to share some with her. Adrian was all curls, dimpled cheeks, and aristocratic airs. Recalling Harriet, I was more reluctant this second time around. “Suppose you overdose and die? It’ll be my fault.” I remembered the suspicious look I thought I had seen in the eyes of white parents my first day. “Oh, for Chrissakes, dahling. I’ve taken more of everything else than you could even dream about. What’s a little smack going to do to me?” Her characteristic way of punctuating sentences with the word “dahling” annoyed everyone but me; it reminded me of Masterpiece Theatre. I was given a similar line by pencil-thin Pearl, the banker’s daughter from Palm Springs. She insisted she’d taken it before, but gave a suspiciously vague description of what the high felt like. She even wanted to go with me to Harlem, having “heard so much about it.” It was as though the entire trust-fund set of Vassar College wanted to be teenage junkies.

Finally, I agreed to share. But absolutely no one would be allowed to make the trip with me. “You’ll attract too much attention, like walking spotlights.” Always the pushover, I returned to Harlem, accompanied by Pearl and a buddy she’d brought along, a German intern. They were to wait in the 125th Street station until I got back. All three of us must have looked like “walking spotlights,” huddling and whispering in the waiting room. “Just sit here and don’t move! And don’t try to make friends. I should be back in about half an hour.” Pearl told me to please be careful, and the German said, “You’re so brave.” Foolish was a more accurate description. My Vassar admirers didn’t know how easily I was outmaneuvered by real project folks. It wasn’t unusual for a dealer to take my payment, then direct me to wait in an empty lobby or at a nearby car, tree, or trash bin — anywhere other than near him. Inevitably, he’d disappear. I came to know from the sound of someone’s promise to “be right back” that he wouldn’t. When I accepted that something, or perhaps everything, about me spelled “easy target,” I began bringing extra money to replace what would invariably be ripped off. There was nothing I could do but sidle over to the next unsavory looking stranger, hoping for the best.

I didn’t see Eddie anywhere and asked for him as he had told me to do. The response was blunt and indifferent. “Eddie locked up. What you need?” I got what I needed and went to see Pops again. I knocked at his door. A neighbor opened hers. “He ain’t there no more, honey. Pops got killed. A robbery.” I stood there dumbfounded. She closed her door. Pops had been shot dead by someone who wanted free syringes and fast money. How could someone kill a gentle old man? I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he, like me, was also out of his league.

I was away longer than expected. When I walked into the train station, there was not a Vassar girl in sight. “Did you see two white girls around here?” I asked an old woman in the restroom. She looked at me suspiciously. No, she hadn’t. I caught the next train to Poughkeepsie and arrived late in the evening. I found Pearl and the German in the campus cafe, drinking beer. We squealed and hugged. They’d left after waiting for an hour, because the ticket clerk kept staring at them, as though they were “prostitutes or something.” We went to Pearl’s room and shared what I’d bought.

Education had taken a back seat to my identity drama. The only class that held my attention was English. The professor, Judy Kroll, was typical of Vassar’s impressive faculty. Not yet thirty, she had published a book of poetry and already had her doctorate. We were on a first-name basis, an informality I had learned to appreciate. Like mine, her identity was a mix of diverse influences. Originally from Queens, she was married to an Indian academic whom she’d met at Dartmouth. A frequent visitor to India, Judy often wore saris, shawls and sandals to class, which seemed very exotic. Celebrity worship best described my feelings, and I felt the delicious rush of a teenage groupie whenever she drove by in her black Mustang convertible, blowing the horn and waving to me. My fellow classmates were envious. “You’re friends with her?! But she’s so aloof to everybody. What’s she like?” “Nice,” I’d respond with false nonchalance. I was thrilled when Judy asked me to help proofread the manuscript of a book she was writing on Sylvia Plath, and then felt petrified that I might miss a typo. I had never met a published author and basked in reflected glory. She welcomed student visits during office hours and seemed to take a genuine interest in our talks about life in Brooklyn and my lack of direction.

In English class, she presented the works of Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath with subtle intensity, and the discussion explored questions of identity from the perspective of these writers. I spent long hours studying the reading material and laboring over my term papers. Something in me resonated to their struggles, despite our obvious differences. On my own, I read Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. A larger identity was taking shape, expanding beyond the project-girl persona I embraced.

Like movement along a fault line, this inner shifting threatened my stability. I sought calm all too often on Harlem’s street corners. Despite, or perhaps because of, my glaring lack of sophistication, most people I met were nice to me. Nonetheless, it was impossible to establish any lasting relationships because folks like Eddie and Pops vanished from one week to the next. My school relations had failed, not surprisingly, given my acting out, to blossom into genuine friendships. And somehow I’d made myself believe that college posed a threat to me but the destructive behavior and caricatures on which I was basing my identity did not. Despair creeped into my soul.
Brenda was out of the room. I turned on the record player and put on a recording of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Then I sat down on my bed, holding a bottle of sleeping pills prescribed for what I’d told the local doctor in town was insomnia. I had decided to die. Thinking in the absolutes typical of depression, I found “everything” sad, overwhelming, and hopeless. The somber piano chords filled my head with grandiose notions of tragic and noble young death. I swallowed two pills and looked at myself in the mirror. No, the glasses had to go; I would look cuter without them. I placed my glasses on the dresser, beneath Kevin’s photo. It hit me how pathetic I was, a coed whose closest relationship was with her kid brother. I took a few more pills. Again, I looked at my reflection. Maybe I looked better with the glasses, more intellectual. I put them on, and washed down another handful of pills. Now I was scared, but there was no turning back: I had already taken so many that if I didn’t finish myself off, I was sure to end up a bedridden vegetable. The bottle empty, I lay down on the bed and waited for drowsiness and death to envelop me.

A half hour passed. Nothing was happening. I put on another record for ambiance, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” I continued to wait to be whisked away to the happy heaven of young poets and rock stars. After an hour without even the slightest yawn, I realized I had been duped. Placebos! I thought angrily. The doctor was probably used to Vassar students coming in with fabricated complaints. More dollars down the drain. I was also relieved, as much as I didn’t want to admit it. No one was happier to have lived to tell the tale than I was, recounting my failed suicide attempt the following day to the mental-health counselor. For my own safety, I was confined to the infirmary. The same day, I unscrewed the window screens of the room and climbed out, took the bus to the station, and hopped the train to 125th Street. Back at school that evening, I skulked around campus, dodging campus security cars, high and content with myself. I called Judy from a phone booth in Main Building. She said, “Everyone’s looking for you.” After a long conversation, she was finally able to persuade me to return to the infirmary.

I opened my eyes the next afternoon and looked directly into Daddy’s heavy face. Mother and Kevin were there, too. Vassar had put me on a medical leave of absence. Then I really wanted to die. Glum and disoriented, I got dressed. Mother and Daddy had already packed up my belongings, so I didn’t even get a last look at my Early Prison Cell room. Four months after my momentous arrival at college, I was on my way home. The brake lights of the tan wagon shone red as Daddy slowed down to let pass a bus marked “West Point Weekend,” full of Vassar girls. As they got off and disappeared across campus, we pulled out and headed toward the expressway. The bike I had “found” outside a dorm and repainted black lay strapped to the top of the car. Silence resounded, except for Daddy’s dire third-person predictions. “She’s gonna end up just like that dope addict girl on the second floor, what’s her name, the one in jail?” From the back window I watched Main Gate recede from view. I was banished from the castle, a project girl again, in fact as well as fantasy. What felt like a one-car funeral procession turned onto a Brooklyn street. Upstairs, I went to my “room of one’s own” and sat for a long time on the side of the bathtub. It had been traumatic to leave home to be resocialized and reeducated in an alien world. But it was worse to be back as a failed college girl. I realized it was far better to be from the projects than in the projects. Like Icarus, I had flown high and suffered a spectacular fall. College had given me a glimpse of a wider, whiter, wealthier world than my own. I wanted to assume its benefits, but not its identity. Did I have to be it, to share in it? That was the conflict that had wrestled me down and threatened to pin me there, in the projects.
SALONJanet McDonald grew up in a housing project in New York City. A graduate of Vassar College, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and New York University School of Law, she is currently a lawyer in Paris.Excerpted from “Project Girl” by Janet McDonald. Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ) 1999 by Janet McDonald. All rights reserved.

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.

- – - – - – - – - -

Cedric is accepted to MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program, a rigorous, six-week minority recruiting program. Eighty-two percent of the MITES who apply to MIT are accepted and Cedric hopes to be one of them, although he is clearly overwhelmed. I was particularly moved listening to a drowning Cedric lie to his hopeful mother about how the program is “getting easier.” Disappointing himself would be painful enough, but letting her down would be even worse. After the phone conversation, we find Cedric upstairs, “lying on his bed with the door closed and lights off, waiting for a miracle that will allow him to keep up with the others … He realizes that there’s only so much he can do. It’s not his fault that he started miles behind where most of the other kids did and he’ll have to run twice their speed to catch them.” I thought back to a phone call I made to my mother during my first year in law school. Floundering and depressed, I told her how hard the work was and how the other students, many of them children of lawyers, seemed to know so much already. But when she said I could always come back home to the projects, I assured her that I was holding my own quite well, thank you. I too was much too proud to accept failure. I was my family’s crown jewel, the only one of seven kids to graduate from college and even go on to law school. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and represent to the world that my project family, in the broadest sense of the term, could succeed.

A delightful passage describes Cedric’s standing as homey-in-residence among the exclusively middle-class black and Hispanic MITES. For Cedric’s 17th birthday, a group of MITES give him what they call a “ghetto bag,” stuffed with, among other things, condoms, boom-box batteries and a rap CD. Cedric is delighted with his newfound status and “ghetto” becomes his favorite word, “his imprimatur of coolness.” Similarly, in college at Vassar, friends would tell me I seemed so tough, so hip. Yet back in Brooklyn, home of the truly tough and hip, I was a New York Times-reading geek. Cedric captures both our experiences as he marvels that “the whole thing … is simply amazing. In this crowd of assimilated, careerist black and Hispanic kids, it is he, Cedric — king of the Ballou nerds, bottom of the Southeast D.C. pecking order — who can claim a particular brand of racial authenticity. Here, by default, he’s actually an arbiter of the fashions, tastes, and habits of inner-city life.”

This little bit of glory makes it all the more painful to witness Cedric crash and burn: His academic skills are not up to par, nor is his conduct, which elicits complaints. A girl complains that Cedric has been “touchy-feely” with her. Teachers and student tutors comment that he seems “volatile and depressed,” his midterm grades are bad. He’s eventually told he’s not “MIT material” and returns to Ballou, crushed. But Cedric’s single-minded resolve returns and he enrolls in the school’s college prep class. A science teacher tells Cedric about a Ballou High athlete who got into Brown a decade ago and, like an ivy-seeking missile, Cedric zeroes in on the prestigious school. He applies early so that he’ll have time to target another school if he’s rejected — and gets admitted. There he struggles initially, but slowly gets his footing, helped financially by a benefactor who’d read about him in the Wall Street Journal.

This leads me to wonder what effect an omnipresent, note-taking reporter had on Cedric’s life. Is he admitted to Brown, despite a 910 SAT score that “puts him nearly 400 points shy” of the average score of 1290, because he’s being tailed by a prominent journalist who’s writing a book — about him? And how plausible is Suskind’s insistence that Cedric was able “to proceed unfettered, to succeed or fail, as would any other freshman” because the professors at Brown didn’t know which student he was following around, this despite Suskind’s highly publicized articles and television appearances?

This is further complicated by the book’s narrative voice, which is a blend of Jennings’ and Suskind’s. The blur is so distracting that I found myself questioning where Cedric ends and Ron begins. Would a black teenage boy from the ghetto describe a crack dealer’s hair as “mottled from being outside all day” (an image I have yet to be able to visualize) or is that the language of a white reporter who simply doesn’t know from knots, naps and peas? In an interesting passage, Cedric visits Justice Clarence Thomas, who has read about the student in the Wall Street Journal and seeks him out. In the guise of mentor, Thomas toots his own horn for hours, rails against affirmative action and advises Cedric to take “real” classes instead of “Afro-American studies stuff.” Yet one might ask whose voice is describing the interior of the U.S. Supreme Court as “shades of white … like it must be in heaven,” Thomas’ grim perspective as a “dark vision” and Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue as a “gritty circus.” And is it really Cedric’s internal voice saying that his high school peers are denizens of a “shadowy corner of America,” whom befriending, like “doing drugs … puts you on a path to ruin”?

It is troubling that Cedric’s quest seems limited to ditching his old life as quickly and completely as possible, along with everyone in it. It is isolating to be different, whether the bad student in a good school or the good student in a bad one. Yet Cedric seemed to keep himself apart even from the other honor students at Ballou. And it’s natural to yearn for something “other,” even an unseen other, if the world around you appears bleak and frightening. But Suskind describes, and seems to celebrate, a young black man consumed by one ambition, “to do well and leave everyone behind.” Cedric is “on a mission to get out of here, to be the one who makes it,” to “get out of this hole.” He “hates” the black kids at Ballou or at least what they “represent,” yet he also initially hates the middle-class blacks in the MIT program because they are the enemy — his competition.

Once at Brown, he shuns other blacks in favor of white males because he has spent his “whole life with blacks.” Although he does, to his credit, make the gesture of returning to Ballou at the end of his freshman year for Alumni Day, he lies to his teachers about having a 4.0 grade-point average, gives a halfhearted speech that he barely believes in and leaves after noticing a blood stain on the floor, “knowing only that there’s no need to ever come back to this place.” But boy, is he happy to get back to Brown and away from his old ‘hood, where people who probably never set foot on a college campus ask him “off-target, generally uninformed questions about his new life in Providence.” Cedric, I ask you, how could it be otherwise? Have a little mercy! In the book’s epilogue we find Cedric “killing time at his clerical job in the Brown admissions office,” savoring the “ease” of his new life. He remembers his old world with all its worry and stress, but cheerily concludes that its absence is “one he can easily live with.” Cedric Jennings has indeed left it all behind, but sadly, he may have also left a little too much of himself along the way.

“A Hope in the Unseen” isn’t the first time a white person has attempted to crawl inside the skin of someone black to tell the story of what that feels like. It was done somewhat embarrassingly in the 1960s in books such as “Black Like Me,” in which the white author donned blackface and strolled briefly through the “Negro’s” world. In the 1990s, films such as “Hoop Dreams” succeeded because they recognized a simple truth — that in any medium, the most compelling voice a person has is his or her own. Perhaps one day Cedric Jennings will write his own memoir.

In an author’s note, Suskind refers to the principal people in the book as “characters” whose “portraits” are elucidated with “internal voice passages, crucial to understanding [their] points of view.” He describes the thoughts and feelings of his characters not from his point of view but from his imagining of their own. Thus, we have an invisible narrator — a virtual Cedric — telling us what Cedric is saying “over and over in his head,” as well as what he thinks, wonders, figures, imagines and muses. Suskind also recounts what Cedric’s mother feels, wonders and thinks, as well as the cogitations of various high schoolers, church-goers and college students. Understandably, he goes to great lengths to persuade us that he, a self-described “white middle-class guy with a mortgage and kids,” has authentically captured America through the eyes of a black teenager from a drug- and violence-plagued inner-city neighborhood who is riddled with all manner of fear, confusion and anger culled over a lifetime. Suskind seeks to bring the reader into this mind, to be the “white guy [who] can get it.” Unfortunately, that’s the problem with the book. The voice we are told we’re hearing is Cedric’s — not that of Ron, the white guy who has gotten it. Certainly, a writer of one race can write the biography of a person of a different race. But the sleight of hand Suskind attempts is far trickier — to write that person’s memoir, which is essentially an act of autobiography. Empathy is one thing, and Suskind has plenty. But channeling, if you will, is quite another. Suskind may be unseen but you definitely know he’s there.