A Hope in the Unseen Read Online Free PDF Page A

LaCountiss Spinner. Pride in such accomplishment is acceptable behavior for sterling students at high schools across the land, but at Ballou and other urban schools like it, something else is at work. Educators have even coined a phrase for it. They call it the crab/bucket syndrome: when one crab tries to climb from the bucket, the others pull it back down. The forces dragging students toward failure—especially those who have crawled farthest up the side—flow through every corner of the school. Inside the bucket, there is little chance of escape.
    The code blue excitement subsides, and Mr. Momen, an Iranian immigrant with a thick accent, closes the classroom door. “All right, every one of you, listen,” he says. “We have today, for you, some exercises that have to be done by the end of class. No exceptions.” He passes out the core teaching tool at Ballou: the worksheet. Attendance is too irregular and books too scarce, even in the advanced sections, to actually teach many lessons during class. Often, worksheets are just the previous day’s homework, and Cedric can finish them quickly.
    Today, though, he runs into trouble. A few minutes in, he looks up and realizes that a girl in the next row is copying his work.
    “Hey, what’re you doing?” he snaps. She begins to giggle and then parlays his attention into a sexual jibe.
    “Listen, Cedric, if you looking for something hot and wet, I’ll give it to you.”
    Guffaws all around.
    “Yeah, and I’ll give you something hard and dry right back,” he counters as the class erupts in catcalls. Cedric is removed from the room. “I put in a lot of hours, a lot of time, to get everything just right,” he says to Mr. Momen from a forest of beakers and microscopes in the adjoining lab area. “I shouldn’t just give answers away.”
    “Cedric,” Mr. Momen says as he turns back to the others, “you have to figure out a way to get along better with people. Other students try hard, too. They’re not all trying to get you.”
    Cedric sits for a moment, alone again, and quietly pushes through the worksheet, calculating, at the very least, what’s being asked of him in physics. He leads the class—including his rival, LaCountiss—in grade points for the semester.
    After class, he makes his way across the width of the building toward the cafeteria, thinking about what Mr. Momen said and what it’s supposed to mean. How can he possibly get along with kids who hate him, he asks himself as he walks, lifting his gaze from the floor and searching the faces of kids flowing in the opposite direction in the hallway. Hate? Well, maybe not hate exactly, he decides. It’s more that they hate what he represents, or something.
    As he watches them pass, Cedric struggles with something that he would rather not know and that he manages, day in and day out, to keep safely submerged: that these kids are not all that different from him, that what mostly differentiates him are transferable qualities like will and faith. Just like him, they are almost all low-income black kids from a shadowy corner of America. His exile is, in large measure, self-induced and enforced. If he changed, soon enough he’d be accepted.
    He knows all this but pushes the thoughts out of his head. Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin. His face, uncharacteristically open and searching a moment ago, slips into its customary pursed-lipped armor. Don’t give up, don’t give in. Other kids, passing him in the hall, pick it up. No one’s a fool here. They recognize Cedric’s face—pinched, dismissive, lookingright past them. They’ve seen this look before, on the faces of white people, and they respond accordingly.
    “Can you believe that sorry ass Cedric,” whispers a pudgy boy, leaning against a locker as Cedric passes.
    A boy on his left—a tall drink of water in a Nike shirt—nods.