A Success Story With Uncertain New Chapters

"What'd he do? Play ball or something?"

In his ideal future, Jennings won't have to answer this question, because the youth of the future won't ask it. He pines now for a job that will allow him both to control an organization from the top down and help others from the bottom up. Maybe director of student counseling services or even principal, though he doesn't know whether he'd be happy with either.

He does not have plans for having kids of his own, referring to his cases as "my family." As for his friends, there's a girl from Brown who lives in Maryland -- "she and I are like brother and sister" -- and he talks to a few people from Ballou. Otherwise he seems to be pretty much a loner.

He so fears not living up to his potential -- a potential advertised to the world in a best-selling book -- that he sometimes works to the point of sickness. His blood pressure recently skyrocketed, and the nurse at work told him to go home, he says. But he wouldn't.

Afterward, he regretted it. "I'm not Superman," he said. "I can't be everywhere at the same time. . . . I need to take care of myself aside from my desire to help other people."

In a way, it all returns to the book, as any life so documented would, preserved in dog-eared pages for posterity. It's about Jennings's encounter with the other Clarence, not Thomas but Taylor, the chem teacher, in the parking lot of Brown during his freshman year. "I always imagined the unseen as a place," Jennings said then, "a place I couldn't yet see, up ahead, where I'd be welcomed and accepted."

"The unseen," Mr. Taylor said, "may be a place in your heart."

And so, 10 years after sharing his vision, Cedric Jennings continues to look.