“A Mark in the Unmarked Place”

By Claudia Moss

He slumped.  Shoulders leaning forward like he supported two worlds, a young black Atlas, stumbling under the weight of his bolder.  He moved down the hall manatee slowly.  Lumbering.  And sluggish.  As though he were horribly alone.

I studied him—tall, thin, close-cropped hair, clothes nondescript, sneakers tattered and without strings; the ennui etched into his finely chiseled features glistened like sweat.  It was as if someone were marching him forward with a loaded rifle aimed at his back.

“Truly the day is more of a gift than that,” I said, adjusting my glasses and shuffling a sheaf of essays I’d been grading to the back of my textbook.  He smelled of motor oil, of tight spaces under engines. 

“Welcome, I am Ms. Jameson, your literature teacher.”  I flashed a disarming grin and presented my outstretched hand.  He appeared uninterested in both. 

“And you are?” 

The question hung like frost between us.

Beyond the door, in the hallway, students bustled and laughed with sixth-period gaiety.

When he eventually raised his hand to mine, he shrugged and emitted a sigh from his middle which seemed to suggest the notion, ‘Here we go again,’ but his lips acknowledged, “Cedric Williams.”  His handshake muttered even less. 

Somewhere it came to me, this Cedric Williams has learned to hide his majesty and joi de vivre behind the ability to vanish in full view.  A closed door, he cowered on the other side, praying someone would offer him a key to himself. 

For a short while, he peered down from a formidable height and raked me with a decisive tedium, one that articulated ‘done-that and been-there and don’t-wanna-be-here-no-more.’

I smiled.  “It is my honor to meet you, Mr. Williams.”

Nodding, he mumbled into his open shirt collar.  “Pleased to meet you, too.”

Then dark, penetrating eyes widened and swallowed the room whole, taking in the desks arranged in an amphitheater setting, the side wall of books, the October sun spilling in the back windows, the white dry-erase boards on the cinder-block wall opposite the bookshelves and the writing-filled board running the length of the front wall, behind my desk which sat poised and papered, center stage.

His survey was complete, I handed him the course syllabus and a literature text from a stack near the front board and outlined both of our course responsibilities.

Cedric let me finish before he spoke.  “I don’t like readin’.”  He weighed the text on the scale of his palms.  “I ain’t never liked this much readin’,” he repeated, in case I couldn’t comprehend and smile simultaneously.

“You like eating?” 

I walked around my desk and pulled out a granola bar, a leftover from my lunch a day ago.  I offered it as though it were manna; he studied it as he might a speeding ticket. 

               “Go on, take it,” I encouraged.  “I love the students on my roll too much to voluntarily delete them.  Some do a decent job of that themselves.”

Cedric’s squinty-eyed expression preceded a grin.  “Thanks.”  

“You’re welcome.”

The tardy bell silenced the hall clamor almost instantly.

“Where is your class?  They are all absent.”  Connecting the observation with the breakfast bar, he added jokingly, “You sure this alright?”

I laughed. 

Somehow, he’d sensed humor and laughter were permissible in this room.  By way of answer, I drew a fistful of peppermints from another drawer and popped the lot into my mouth.  “Take your chances,” I challenged, winking.  “If your question is, ‘Where is my class?’ the class is in the auditorium, where I hold rehearsals for our original class play.”  I gathered my keys, roll book and essays.  “Assumptions may be food for judgment, Mr. Williams, but this class will be cuisine for your soul.” 

I stepped back from the classroom door, waving him forward.  “Shall we?”

“Ced,” as we came to call him, fell into the structure of the class like a soldier.  He cut his conversations short with the young ladies who listened to his quiet rap against the junior hall lockers so that he was seated and awaiting my class greeting the second the tardy bell sounded. 

He sat at our class table of assignments hunched over, as though he were studying lice under a microscope in Mrs. Gilbert’s science lab.  He tried, half-heartedly at first, then with more of himself in it, to work alongside his fellow classmates.  With time, he eased out on a proverbial reading limb growing sturdy and long from the tree of knowledge.  He slipped and crept, crawled and stuttered, and eventually plummeted to the grass below the tree’s branches, where gnarled roots were peeping cables. 

But he was tough.  And familiar with falling flat on his back or face—with him, falling was falling and down was down, nothing good in it.  He could count on that, although he hadn’t counted on how easy it was to get up, when the ground was soft and mined with laughter to make a student want to fall, just so he could rise and scale the tree faster.  Especially so, he discovered, in a class so welcoming, it could have been one of his grandma’s colorful, patchwork quilts.  During the second semester, “Ced” found nourishment not only in himself but also in August Wilson, even though, one day, he fell so hard, his hope shattered.

She clutched a misshapen, once-black bag close to her body.  A beat-up coat screamed to protect her pinched shoulders.  But try as it might, the button-less wonder did even less to hide the flecks of grease and flour down her dress.

“Miz Jameson?”  It was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes, ma’am.  Hello!”  I greeted her warmly.  “Mrs. Williams?”

In her mirrored smile, a reflection of Cedric beamed brightly. 

“Has Cedric been ill?”  He’d been absent from class now for going on two weeks, and the telephone numbers on his information card were disconnected.

Suddenly, sorrow welled up in the older woman’s eyes, and trouble announced itself in the taut dark skin across her knuckles.

“No, ma’am.  I wish I could own that, but I can’t.  My grandboy in jail.”

What she said next connected us forever.

“You my last hope.” 

The words nourished my soul.  Empowering me.  Reminded me I could do the impossible.  That and the fact that Ced had asked his grandmother if I would entrust him with a hardback, classroom copy of “The Piano Lesson.”  During the drama unit, Ced had begun to fall victim to August Wilson’s charm just before it happened.  As such, I couldn’t deny him the play, a drama I loved, filled with the rich voices of the South, of family, of love, of hard falls, but most of all, of restored hope.

Thus, I humbled myself to Mrs. Williams’ request.

The letter took me an entire weekend to pen.  In it, I knew I had to work magic.  So, I cloaked myself in determination and spoke for my student, a young man who had come a long way, from ‘No Count’ to ‘Somebody’ in his literature studies.  I painted a portrait of his quiet, classroom demeanor and how it might have been mistaken for dejection by a cursory observer, but his peers and I knew better.  Ced was thinking, his hang-back, country-boy wisdom waiting to enlighten us and to silence foolishness from one of our two class clowns.

The letter had to convey to the court that although Cedric Williams had been with the bevy of boys who robbed and killed someone, Ced could now put his thoughts to paper in a coherent fashion.  With his own style.  My words had to hold the weight of the future for a young man, conceivably, in the wrong place, at the wrong time; yet while shimmering with hope, they had to relay the message that quite possibly Cedric Williams’ involvement was, ironically, right in its wrongness.

In the end, the letter flew like the thing with feathers in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope.”  It paved the path for Cedric’s quiet return and his dedicated climb back up the tree of life from what was to be one of his hardest, adolescent falls.

One Thursday evening at the end of an exhausting day in May, when my soul yet leaped, recapping this student’s explication of a poem’s lines or that student’s excited round-robin reading or another’s lively discussions of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”, I looked up from another leaning tower of essays and blinked at Cedric Williams’ ecstatic presence.  Older now, by two or three years, he still boasted a gentle repose.  It wasn’t difficult to discern he’d been joyous through the years.

“Hey, Ms. Jameson,” he marveled, checking his watch.  “Shouldn’t you be home having dinner?”

“Ced Williams, you know I don’t leave until everything is ready for the next day.”

  I stood, the circulation in my legs questionable, and stretched.  “Have you been gone that long?”

He dug his hands into his jean pockets and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  

“You remember me?”

I frowned then.  Gave him a feigned grimace.  “How is life treating you?  What are you doing now?”

“I don’t complain.  Life is good.  After graduation, I started working for a body shop not too far from the school.  I worked for the owner while I was here, and later, he helped me get into a trade school, where I took up bodywork.  Auto mechanics.”  He paused.  “It’s what I do and do well.”

I nodded, knowing he hadn’t ventured back after all this time to tell me he was employed at a body shop down the road.  Somehow, I could sense heavy thoughts in his heart, as I knew he needed me quiet so he could say what he’d come out of his day to say.  So, I kept my mouth closed and listened.

“I know if you could’ve had your way, I’d be in a four-year college, studying literature, and that’s cool.  But you said a lotta stuff that stayed with me, like the things my grandma says.  When you talked—and I say this because you might not know it—me and everybody listened, like you listening to me now, when you could be making tracks to the parking lot.”

“Anyway, one thing you used to say—,” he couldn’t help laughing at the thought.  “Do you still say this?”

“Depends.  What is it?”

He searched the front board.  “Yeah, you do.” 

I followed his finger to the life lesson written in one sentence under the date.

“You always said, ‘Do what you want to do and never be afraid to follow your dreams.  Don’t judge yourself and others and hold your head high.’”

I bowed my head.  A feeling of honor humbling me, I swallowed the stark reminder that I had yet to adhere to my own dream-catcher advice.

“Well, I’m an auto body man because I want to be because I’m following my dreams.  One day, I’m going to own a shop, that one or another one.  Don’t matter.  Every day I work on leaving ‘a mark in the unmarked place,’ in the exact words, I think, of my favorite playwright.  See, Ms. Jameson, I took the love of reading some things with me, and August Wilson’s plays is one of them.”

By this time, in my father’s words, ‘I could have been sold for a plugged nickel.’  August Wilson was bread to hunger, wheatgrass to fatigue.

“But I didn’t come by to share that, though I thank you for being the best teacher I ever had.  And thank you for writing that letter and speaking for me when nobody else would.  I will never forget that.  I’m not going to keep you much longer.  I gotta go, too, but I really came to say, ‘If you ever need work on your car, call me.  I will do it free, to honor you.  Okay?’”

“Yes, sir,” I consented graciously.  “I believe you.  And I will say, ‘Thank you for being my student.  It was wonderful being a part of your transformation from a shy, insecure young man, unsure about what he had to offer, to a respected leader, a young man who no longer lives by bread alone.”

Cedric shook his head and grinned.  “See, there you go–uplifting and inspiring.” 

Then he bowed low and walked away.

Our paths never crossed again after that evening, but Cedric’s soulful words and memory buoyed me up daily.