Free A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind Page B

well as his furious drive for acceptance. He knows it but backs away from it. He’s not going to get into a long discussion about his father, not today. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, rising from the desk, gathering his things. “You know about all that already, me wanting my father to love me or whatever. I hear you. But I want to make it to MIT or wherever for me, too. I know it’s crazy, but I believe that’s where I belong, even if they’re places I haven’t really seen.”
    Mr. Taylor smiles, all Cheshire cat now, rocking back on his heels. And Cedric immediately guesses where the teacher’s mind is racing. Incoming Scripture.
    “Oh God, what now?” Cedric says, grabbing his bookbag, shaking his head with a there-you-go-again grin.
    “Hebrews 11:1,” says Mr. Taylor. “The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.”
    “NO. Wrong—you messed it!” Cedric laughs. “It goes: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Man, Mr. Taylor, you always getting ‘em wrong.”
    Mr. Taylor howls. “All right, extra point for you,” but, as usual, he wrestles the boy back to middle ground, thwarting an outright victory. “The Word, of course, is the Word my young friend. But make it into what’s right for you. That’s the lesson for today. Take from the Holy Scripture only what you need, nothing more.”
    Cedric looks quizzically at Mr. Taylor. “You always be talking in riddles,” he says with a chuckle and waves farewell as he strolls by. What, he wonders, did all that mean—take from Scripture only what you need? Maybe, he wonders, passing through the doorway, it means deciding on a few lessons from Scripture you can really use, day to day, and holding tight to them. Everyone’s life is different, after all, and everyone hears the Word a little differently.
    Then he turns the botched line over in his head and hears his giggle echo through the empty hallway. A hope in the unseen. Sort of a pocket-sized version of the original, and not really a religious phrase, he decides, but one you can definitely take with you.
    T he Bluebird, a squat diesel bus custom-painted the cobalt blue and eggshell white of the U.S. Marshall’s service, idles just inside the barbed-wire gates of Lorton Correctional Institution, waiting for the morning’s cargo.
    A hundred yards away, inside a long, low mess hall, Cedric Gilliam looks disdainfully at the steam trays of corned beef hash before sliding forward his Styrofoam tray for a ladleful. At 4:45 A.M. , on the edge of northern Virginia’s suburbs, the minimum security section of Lorton’s sprawling, 10,100-prisoner complex in the grassy Blue Ridge foothills is in a half-conscious state. Literally. About half this facility’s 930 inmates are here for breakfast in their pale-blue cotton two-piecers, most of them planning to return to bed once their bellies are full.
    Like every morning these days, Cedric Gilliam sits quietly at a four-man table, picking at his food and savoring a faint scent of privilege. Everyone knows the score: he’s one of about three dozen guys dressedin jeans and casual shirts who will soon be transported by the Bluebird through the curling thicket of barbed wire to work/release jobs in Washington. But now that Cedric is entering the eighth month of his gig cutting hair at a barbershop in Northeast D.C., most of the “first time in a long time” moments are long past—like his first big-screen movie (sixth day out), his first lay (that same afternoon), and his first reunion with his mom’s home cooking.
    Not that each dawn to dusk of freedom—following eight long years of captivity—isn’t vivid and invigorating. It is. Each moment. Full of temptations, too, which are steadily eroding his initial resolution to follow the rules. No surprises there. He has recently convinced himself that it’s natural for any man to partake of some things he’s so long been denied and that it’s the smart man who can be