Inner-city Odyssey

Cedric Jennings has retreated to his bedroom in the tiny, southeast Washington, D.C. apartment, and he's not coming out. His mother, a low-wage government employee and devout Pentecostal, answers the knock at her front door. "Ma'am, my name is Steve Turner from the U.S. Marshall's Service and I'm here to evict you from these premises. You understand how this works?"

Barbara and Cedric both know how it works. It's happened before. A crew of movers bustle in, carry out all of the family's belongings and leave them on the nearest scrap of open sidewalk. As the photo albums and silverware pile high in the summer sun, the crowd of neighborhood vultures gather round it. But they can't touch any of it yet, not until the movers have pulled out every last possession. Up until that moment, Barbara can stop the whole ordeal by coming up with the nearly $3,000 she owes her landlord. But where's she going to get that kind of money?

Cedric can't watch. Yes, it's happened before. But it's been years since the last time, long before the day nine months ago when Cedric left his home for Brown University.

Ron Suskind, a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, had first met Cedric three years earlier. Looking for a success story in the nation's decimated inner-city schools, Suskind found Cedric, whose high school principal, the author writes, said Cedric was "too proud" for his own good. The boy's mother had spent years on welfare. His father was a drug addict, doing another stretch of time in prison for a laundry list of small crimes. But Cedric was a straight-A student in the city's most violent school. He became the subject of two Journal articles, and Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize.

What can easily get lost, then, amid Suskind's breathtaking, revelatory book, A Hope in the Unseen, which expands on his earlier pieces, is how admirable it is that he even wrote the book in the first place. Suskind's work with Cedric made his career. It earned him the journalistic equivalent of an Academy Award. His pieces for the newspaper ended with a slam dunk: Cedric, who had earlier been told by a respected professor that he was "not M.I.T. material," recouped and fought his way into the Ivy League. The ending is happy, the reporter heads home. But Suskind didn't. He knew the freshman year experience could ravage Cedric's confidence and send him hurtling back to the streets of D.C. So he stuck with the young man all the way to college.

A Hope in the Unseen (Broadway, 372 pgs.) encompasses the two Journal articles, beginning with Cedric's junior year of high school and following him through his bumpy first year at Brown. Suskind's account of Cedric's high school years is more piercing, if only because it's less familiar and the stakes much loftier. In the halls of Ballou Senior High, where kids are killed routinely, Cedric is a loner, headstrong but evasive. This is a place where having your name on a wall citing academic achievers can cost you much more than your lunch money. It's genuinely visceral stuff, sure to raise the reader's ire. And Suskind helps you lose your temper by keeping his own. He doesn't cheapen Cedric's experiences by using them to make an argument. And he doesn't slide into sentimentality to pitch for our sympathy. On the contrary, his unwavering authorial voice makes the young man's story all the more sobering. There is no symphonic score lacing Suskind's narrative, just the dull, quiet reality of the pages turning.

Suskind's only real obstacle is the personality of his subject. Cedric'spredicament is, unfortunately, more engaging than Cedric himself. The young man's devotion to his faith and his studies is unwavering. It's the gift that allows him to survive. But he never wrestles with temptation, never truly has fun or pauses to take in the sweep of his accomplishments. As a result, his story is like a cold slap-and so is he.

None of Cedric's shortcomings, however, diminish the impact of his difficult life. Back at his bedroom in D.C., as the movers pick apart his home, his older sister tries to console him. "I don't belong here anymore," Cedric says. He's right. No one does, least of all Cedric. But he crawled his way out by fighting the "dreambusters" and holding onto his aspirations for a better, though alien, life. He puts his hope in the unseen. And Suskind, the ever-present observer, recounts Cedric's odyssey with transporting intelligence. His book is truly an essential read.