A Success Story With Uncertain New Chapters

And Jennings, then a firecracker, replied: "I guess I'm just hoping I won't have a reason to become an angry person. That I'll be accepted up ahead for who I am."

Since graduating from Brown in 1999 with a 3.3 GPA, Jennings has hopped between worlds. He migrated from what might be fairly called public welfare work to self-advancing jobs and back again. In his current job, he was making $58,628 by the end of 2007 -- good money, but not nearly what he could be making at, say, Goldman Sachs, where he turned down a job offer after leaving Brown.

Suskind has split royalties from the book with Jennings and his mother (he didn't tell them he would until just before the book was published). Jennings's hopscotch career path includes stints at the Salvation Army, an Internet start-up, a data-mining company, an education think tank and a foster care firm. Along the way he was inspired by his former chemistry teacher at Ballou, Clarence Taylor, to get a master's from Harvard in education and another from Michigan in social work.

"Cedric has an earned ability and earned confidence and earned capability to cross borders between the worlds," says Suskind, who has stayed in close contact with his subject throughout the years, inviting him to dinners and his son's bar mitzvah. "I think that the thing that is hopeful about Cedric's journey is that he does have a passport, he does have a way of essentially navigating."

But the ability to cover all that ground has not come without a tension -- as with a tent staked in corners too far apart. "I guess I shouldn't say it's a curse when you have different things you're good at and you're not sure what you want to do," Jennings says, taking time to choose his words. "It can be frustrating."

Jennings's social work goes to the very heart of his own journey. At first, he was responsible for evaluating caregivers, which occasionally meant pulling children from their parents (his own father spent Jennings's childhood incarcerated on drug charges). He currently compiles reports for foster children about their biological families, so if they choose, they can visit the court at 18 to learn whence they come. In this sense, Cedric Jennings has become a biographer like Ron Suskind.

But the nagging question, put to him by friends, family and himself, is whether the anointed ghetto miracle couldn't be doing more with his unique background, his elevation from urban poverty to the educated middle class. It's as much a question of who he is as a question of who he has become in readers' minds.

"I was actually supposed to be living in New York or working on Wall Street," he says. "Either I was gonna be on Wall Street or in the music industry doing A&R. But there was always this aspect of me that wanted to help people."

Barbara Jennings keeps urging her son to leave the area, just as she did in the book, when they believed in an improbable escape with all the fervor of their Pentecostal faith. She has made him promise he'll get his PhD (in either social work or education) in her lifetime. And to her, this area will always be dominated by one Washington, the bad Washington, which worked against her son's interests for years, glorifying violence and sex and sports. Never education or advancement.

"When he was in Harvard and Brown, the atmosphere up there was so nice," she says. "And he fit in so good."

Barbara still works in a low-level position at the Agriculture Department, still lives in Southeast Washington, though in a nicer apartment than the one in which she raised Cedric. You revisit that original building at 16th and V SE one afternoon, crossing the glinting Anacostia as motorboats cut it like razor blades. Suskind called High View Apartments "blond brick," but now it looks like a nicotinic tooth. Behind it a circle of guys in their 20s huddle in white T-shirts; one of them looks dazed, rocking into an apparently drugged groove.

They don't live in this building, they say, and haven't heard of Cedric, but when they find out he accomplished something, that he was once the pride of this neighborhood, the boy who pushed and pushed until he was no longer trapped inside, one tough asks the inevitable question: