A Hope in the Unseen: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Cedric is listening carefully in his History of Education course, held at 8:30 A.M. in a dark basement classroom that has many of his classmates falling asleep. Cedric assumes that these students already know the information the Professor James is teaching, but he certainly does not. James mentions Ellis Island, and Cedric scribbles it down, the references completely going over his head. He has found in his first month at Brown that while he is just keeping his head above water, his classmates seem to know what to do without asking, even the ones who sleep through class, like they are privy to some source of knowledge that Cedric does not have access to. After class ends, he goes to his Spanish class, where at least he feels that he is on the same footing as his classmates.

When his classes are finished for the day, Cedric decides to treat himself to lunch with the money left over from his monthly support check of $200 from Dr. Korb, his patron. He goes to Café Paragon, which is packed, giving him a good chance to eavesdrop on his fellow diners. The hot topic of the day is affirmative action, especially as there have recently been protests in California in response to the ending of preferential admissions based on race. Brown takes part in affirmative action, offering a select number of places to students from underrepresented groups. But like many colleges and universities that take part in affirmative action, this support does not extend past the offer of admission.

Once students like Cedric arrive on the Brown campus, they are left to their own devices. While there are tutoring and counseling services available to students, minority students often avoid taking advantage of those services out of shame and fear that someone will discover that they are struggling. This leads to higher dropout rates among minorities and students from low-income backgrounds. Cedric overhears two professors talking about this topic, and one comments to the other that bringing affirmative action students up to the level of their fellow students would take more resources than most universities have.

Cedric longs to join the conversation between the two professors, and tell him about his journey and how it has built within him a king of strength and conviction that other students do not have. But he is also filled with self-doubt, as he beings to wonder if this is enough to get him through his college years. As the professors leave, they begin discussing minority professors on campus, arguing that they have only been hired for their perspective and are not real scholars held to the same academic standard.

When Cedric leaves the restaurant, he passes his Richard Wright professor, Stephan Wheelock, who is engaged in a deep conversation with a friend. Cedric overhears him—a black graduate student from Mississippi—talking about his experience with affirmative action and the minority experience at Brown. Wheelock notes that while Brown wants students to think that they are all equal and on the same footing, people like him did not have the same upbringing, advantages, and access that would empower them to be successful in academia. Cedric spends the rest of the day mulling over what he has heard, and wishing that his success or failure at Brown would not be considered representative of the entire African American race.

Cedric is still trying to work out some ground rules with his roommate Rob, regarding control of the stereo. They have decided that whoever is in the room first has control of the music, and the other roommate must wait patiently—music control is only given up if the roommate leaves the room.  They also disagree about cleanliness: Rob, accustomed to cleaning ladies, is not interested in using his precious free time to mop the floor, while Cedric sees cleanliness as one more aspect of his life that he must control in this new world. He also recognizes that while Rob makes their classmates and neighbors comfortable, and makes friends easily, Cedric has the opposite effect on them, and spends much of his time alone. This bothers Cedric, as he navigates his feelings of anxiety and loneliness.

Back at Ballou, Cedric had built a wall in order to resist the lure of drinking, drugs, and sex. While the peer pressure was strong and often backed up by violence, Cedric also had daily support from his mother and Bishop Long, as well as the constant reminder of the negative consequences of those actions, in the form of his father, Cedric Gilliam. Here at Brown, however, he is faced with the knowledge that even smart and ambitious kids partake in those same activities. The self-denial that was necessary in high school seems strange here, but it has become part of who he is.

One evening, Cedric decides to be social, wandering into the dorm room of John Frank and Zayd Dohrn, two popular white kids from his unit. He doesn’t know much about them, because he has been reluctant to get to know many of his classmates at all, and when he looks at Zayd’s CD collection, he is surprised and impressed. Zayd listens to rap music, which confuses Cedric to no end, and as the two kids begin to talk about music, Cedric realizes that he has found his first friend. That evening, he lays in bed smiling, thinking about the first time he met Zayd, when the tall blonde boy informed Cedric and another classmate that he enjoyed oral sex. To Cedric, the idea is as strange as a name like Zayd.

After a short meeting about a group project for their Richard Wright class, Cedric walks back to his dorm with Chiniqua, the other African American student in his unit. He jokingly describes her as a “ghetto girl in disguise,” and she is a mixture of two worlds, to a certain extent. She comes from a working-class background—her father is a bus driver and her mother is a teacher’s aide—but has spent much of her time in prep schools in Manhattan, thanks to a program called Prep for Prep. She was chosen for the program in the sixth grade, and began to attend Columbia Prep, a prestigious private school, and given both tutoring and counseling on a regular basis. She scored 1100 on her SATs, and did not need affirmative action to attend Brown University.

Cedric and Chiniqua discuss the recent trial of O.J. Simpson, a famous African American athlete who was accused of killing his wife, a white woman, but was acquitted. This story has the Brown campus talking, as many whites are outraged by the perceived lack of justice in the case, and African Americans feel “a swell of jumbled, out-of-context pride.” Cedric asks Chiniqua what she thinks of the case, and she responds that she has been surrounded by people who are angry about the outcome, but who will not say anything about it to her. She attended the school’s mandatory racial outreach meeting, which Cedric skipped out on, making her the only African American in the room. She left early, and felt that she was letting the group down, now that there would be no African American presence in the group.

Like Cedric, there is more to Chiniqua than meets the eye. But unlike him, she has grown up around white classmates and their families for her whole life, and thus does not consider them special or mysterious. She was the one who would wreck grading curves in school, and she is not feeling intimidated here at Brown, either. She has also begun to spend time at Harambee House, the African American dorm and has invited Cedric, though he mentioned something about spending his whole life around black people and wondering if there was a place for him among non-blacks.

Cedric has been spending more time with Zayd, and this evening the two are chatting about the O.J. trial—Zayd thinks that he is guilty, but that overall, black men are often framed by the police. They are discussing Marion Barry when Zayd’s roommate comes in and argues that the former D.C. mayor was recorded on video smoking crack cocaine, and therefore it doesn’t matter if he was targeted by police. Cedric disagrees, claiming that as a black politician, he was targeted from day one. As he argues his point, a number of other students from the unit come into the room, and Cedric senses that they really want to hear what he has to say.

Cedric knows that racial differences underlie his relationships with everyone in his unit. He is both black and standoffish, and others worry that he does not like them for being white. This also factors into his tension with Rob: Cedric often has to act as Rob’s social secretary, answering the door and the phone to Rob’s friends who want to make, change, or cancel plans, and he has screwed up a few times. When Rob confronted him about it, Cedric felt that his roommate’s anger and condescension would be less if he weren’t black. The argument escalates and the roommates nearly start fighting.

Cedric Gilliam is finally ready to turn himself in for parole violation. For the first few months he was out, things were going well, but then Cedric, Sr., started to use heroin again, and his girlfriend Leona kicked him out of her apartment. He went to treatment, but continued to use drugs, and ended up hiding out at the apartment of another girlfriend, Sherene, while the U.S. Marshals were looking for him. Sherene suggested that he turn himself in, and while he did not want to, he began to think about his son, Cedric, who was managing things so well at Brown. It made Cedric, Sr., realize that he needed to stop running away from his problems, and he called a parole officer and set a time to be picked up and returned to prison.

Cedric Gilliam alternates between feeling good about being responsible and hating the lack of freedom in the medium-security facility. On the day of his hearing, he sees Sherene for a moment, and meets his lawyer briefly before being taken into court. He sizes up the parole board member who will decide his fate, and knows that he favors Hispanics over blacks in these kinds of cases. He listens to the rundown of his entire criminal history and the conversation between his lawyer and the judge, and finally blurts out that he wants to be placed in an inpatient drug program, rather than going back to prison, where drug use is rampant. The judge agrees, though Cedric, Sr., will have to go back to Lorton prison until they can find a spot for him in a yearlong inpatient program.

Cedric is in the dining hall, looking at the calculus midterm that he aced, and feels bad about the fact that he shot so low for this first semester. And during the midterm study period, he and Rob have been keeping their distance from one another, though Cedric still makes an effort to spend time with the other white kids from his unit. He is confused by their group dynamic, which is nearly the complete opposite of the way that African American men act around one another, at least in Cedric’s neighborhood. They are physically affectionate with one another, and tend to be very self-deprecating, as if they do not need to build up their self-images for one another.

One afternoon, the guys are all hanging out together in Zayd’s room, and the conversation takes a slightly homoerotic turn. They begin to offer to fill each others’ gas tanks, and Cedric is the only one who doesn’t laugh at the idea, which makes them push a little harder with the joke. He finally tells them all that he doesn’t like the conversation, and hides out in his room. He later has a confrontation with one of the kids, and Zayd tries to tell Cedric that not everyone is against him, but Cedric is too upset and just goes back to the safety of his room.

Zayd is the only person brave enough to continue to try to penetrate Cedric’s armor. He notes that other kids wonder why he and Cedric are friends, but he likes the fact that they are so different. This may be an effect of his upbringing, a son of two radical professors who have made a point of exposing him to counterculture since childhood. Zayd knocks on Cedric’s door, where he has been hiding out for days, and even leaves him a note asking if they are still friends. One day, the door is open and Zayd goes in to talk to Cedric about the new Tupac Shakur album that has just come out, noting that he was named after Tupac’s uncle, Zayd Shakur, a radical activist that his parents may have known personally. This helps draw Cedric out of his shell again, and the two go downtown to buy a CD together.