The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (25 page)

Less joyful was the “bio” Rob gave to Elihu a few weeks before graduation. The bio was the fundamental element of the secret society tradition: in any medium you chose and over any length of time you needed, you gave your life story to the eleven classmates with whom you'd been spending two nights a week throughout senior year. You were supposed to dig deep and challenge yourself, as well as place complete trust in the listeners to keep everything confidential. The Elihu Class of '02 had been atypically diverse in a socioeconomic sense, with a disproportionate number of minority kids who'd come to Yale from poverty. Giving a bio could be stressful; one felt an inherent pressure to “tell a story,” and in order to do so, construct conflict, which was harder for some than for others. When, during the winter, a girl had gone on at length about the social stresses of the Dalton School—an expensive prep school on which the TV show
Gossip Girl
was based—a poor student from Chicago had begun to seethe, to the point of interrupting her and pointing out that these were not problems, not “real” ones, anyway. The girl had become defensive; this was her bio, and an important safety net in giving it was the understanding that judgments would be suspended. But still, a kind of class warfare erupted as the group split into sides: the poor kids aligned in taking offense at having to sit through five hours' worth of “rich people problems,” and the well-off kids maintaining that problems were relative and the girl should be permitted—and encouraged—to share the issues that weighed on her. Rob stayed out of the fray, as he stayed out of
most of the conflicts that had occurred in the Elihu house. But on that night, he came to be regarded as the final authority on the matter, since his circumstances growing up had been the most “real” of any.

“Just let her talk,” he said, sipping his brandy as if for dramatic effect. And then, to the kids who'd been hassling her, “Damn, it's like you people can't just listen without trying to start shit.”

“
You people?”

“You heard what I said. You're acting like you're all the same, so that's how I'll address you.”

“That's fucked-up, Rob.”

“And it's fucked-up the way you're treating her, like she's not an individual, either.” Then, to the girl, “Proceed.”

As Rob's bio approached, the Elihu house filled with genuine curiosity. He'd always been content to drink the free booze and smoke up the house but reluctant to engage in any of the meaningful personal debate that the secret society was intended to prompt. They figured he would keep it short and focus mainly on his mother. He might touch on racism at Yale or something controversial like that, just to see how everyone would react.

They did not expect that he would talk for four full hours about a part of him they'd previously heard nothing of: his father.

Seated at the head of a long oak table, speaking with no notes or pictures, he told them about his mother's unique filial strategy, the nights spent doing homework, the days spent wandering around the neighborhood. He told them about the fire on Pierson Street, the apartment on Chestnut, the wide orbit of men his father maintained. He told them about the trial, the prison visits, the successful appeal and its reversal. He told them about the letters he continued to send to various appellate judges every month. He painted the broad picture of a great man egregiously wronged by a system engineered against “people like him,” and he walked the Elihu society through the day of August 8, 1987, as if he'd been an omniscient observer over everyone involved—the Moore sisters, the police, and the prosecutors. He spent a lot of time focusing on the murder weapon and how his father owned it because you had to carry a piece if you were “about that life.” But the real murderer had broken
into his father's apartment in 2E, stolen his weapon, used it to murder the Moore sisters in 2D, and then returned it to 2E. The police had then illegally removed the gun from the scene to plant on his father, so that the case could be closed quickly and spare them the trouble of having to actually do their jobs. For the entire year, Rob had placed himself above petty class conflicts that had plagued many of their discussions. On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.

Arthur Turpin had become close to Rob that year. An affluent student with an aristocratic way about him, he and Rob had passed many Thursday nights playing pool and having fun with their contrasting personas—in other words, they “fucked with each other.” Arthur had always been troubled by the anger he sensed in Rob. Though he hid that anger well behind the grin and the laughter and the marijuana, Arthur felt it in the jokes Rob made to Laurel and others about their privileged upbringings, in his heavy quietude whenever socioeconomic topics came up in conversation, and in his general disdain of Yale and Yalies. Arthur saw a closed-mindedness that was, he felt, self-propagating and innately limiting. More broadly, he believed these qualities explained precisely how an intelligent guy like Rob would always make life harder on himself than it needed to be. Here he was, drinking brandy in a prestigious society in a top-ranked school, the beneficiary of so many gifts both natural and bestowed, surrounded by bright and open-minded classmates, and yet still he remained mired in, even paralyzed by, what was effectively his own racism. Of course, Arthur never broached the subject with Rob, since it was easier to screw around instead. He'd made assumptions about his friend that were treacherous to air out, the central one being the most common: you truly can't shed your roots.

On the night of Rob's bio, Arthur realized that those roots were embedded far deeper than he ever could have imagined. He felt very sad for his friend that night, listening to Rob arduously construct his own defense of his father, the defense he believed Skeet was deprived of fifteen years ago, a defense that came with its own many loose ends. Rob
was able to intellectualize almost every argument that arose, but where Skeet Douglas was concerned, each word of the thousands Rob spoke came from a deeply, dangerously emotional place. In truth, even after all the hours he'd spent in Trenton State talking to Skeet about it, Rob seemed to have no idea where his father was or what he was doing on that morning. Arthur found it quite obvious that until Rob was able to place his father that day long ago, he'd have a hell of a time trying to place himself here, now.

I
'D BEEN CONFUSED
by Rob's vague plan following graduation, and why it seemed to center on a twenty-two-year-old Yale graduate living with his mother in a poor neighborhood.

Then I visited him in East Orange that spring, during the reading week that preceded final exams. I was en route to Manhattan to visit my brother, and the side trip to East Orange was a statement of sorts: I'd realized that though I'd offered dozens of times to take him out to dinner with my visiting family or even take him home with me for a weekend, never once had I proposed doing something where he came from. I didn't tell my parents about the visit; I could just hear my mom saying, “Be careful.”

Rob picked me up at the train station and acted as a tour guide. He drove me past St. Benedict's Prep, Branch Brook Park, Schools Stadium, and ultimately to a cookout at his Aunt Debbie's apartment. What was unnerving about Newark, as we moved west and the hospitals and colleges and greens of downtown gave way to graffiti, grit, and loiterers, was how cemented the poverty seemed to be, unfolding in all directions, like the ocean going on and on, never-ending. Despite the progressive motivations that had prompted the visit, I did feel tense as it became apparent that I might be the only white person within three miles. And yet, with Rob at the wheel, waving to people in the street and attaching childhood stories to practically every corner, the neighborhood didn't feel like a slum. Its streets were dirty, run-down, very poor, and very black, but they didn't feel threatening, not sitting next to Rob. As we crossed into East Orange proper, I was attuned to the way he leaned
back in the driver's seat, one arm slung out the window, skully knotted tightly, bass thumping. He was at ease.

The reception he received at the cookout—at least three dozen people packed into a small yard behind an apartment complex on Hamilton Avenue—was warm in a way I'd never experienced in my own WASP upbringing, where handshakes were followed by vague descriptions of “what's new,” then dinner. Carl was there, as was Dante, and Rob's cousins Nathan and Diandra and Corey. Rob was the mayor of this potluck gathering, but he deflected any awe directed toward him. His grandmother, Frances, was in a wheelchair with tubes in her nostrils; her emphysema had been worsening throughout Rob's college years. Horace, beside her, looked very old and sullen behind a fixed smile. We stood by her wheelchair most of the afternoon as Rob asked everyone what was going on in the neighborhood, what was going on in their lives, offering small bits of advice to those having trouble at home or at work. One of his cousins mentioned that she was about to be kicked out of her apartment because she was $600 behind on rent. Rob took her aside, out of everyone's earshot, and told her he would take care of it. “I got you,” he said. “Now give me a hug.”

What struck me in particular was the amazement on display that not only was he graduating from Yale, but he was going to do so in four years.
“Four years!”
people kept exhaling disbelievingly, as if the typical time span for achieving a bachelor's degree was unfathomable. “My man graduating
Yale
in
four years . . .
” Jackie was the only one present who didn't seem ecstatic about Rob's pending accomplishment. She sat in a lawn chair in the back of the yard, chain-smoking menthols. She looked much older than I remembered her on orientation day, the last time I'd seen her, more gray and with a harder jaw, and she was still hard to impress—not by the effort I'd taken to come here, not by the effort Rob had taken to make it through Yale. Looking back now, it is easy to feel as if she alone knew that success and happiness in life were more elusive even than an Ivy League diploma.

Night had fallen by the time he took me back to the train station. He asked if I wanted to stop for something to eat in the Ironbound, at
a Portuguese restaurant he loved. He told me how seedy Ferry Street had been not too long ago, and how its revival into a busy stretch of green and red restaurant awnings was miraculous. He used that word, “miraculous,” a word I'd never heard come out of his mouth before. I said I had to get to the city to meet my brother, and I knew that Rob was heading back to East Orange to see his “boys.” I also knew that he had to attend to the matter of re-upping his marijuana supply for graduation, which was going to be a boon for business. We slapped hands and I watched him aggressively pull his beater car into the traffic snarl that was Raymond Boulevard. Through the window, riding low, he looked serious all of a sudden, very grown-up.

Nobody looked grown-up on graduation day. Much like orientation three and a half years earlier, the weekend was an endless succession of ceremonies and speeches, the lawns newly seeded for the trampling pleasure of graduates and their families, most of us in some level of drunkenness at all times. To begin, elected class representatives planted a symbolic ivy vine outside one of the classroom buildings, while a sentimental, student-written poem titled “Ivy Ode” was read aloud.

On Class Day, the first of the two-day-long proceedings, we were each supposed to wear a hat that said something about ourselves. I sat next to Rob during the ceremony, and in front of us arose a three-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower from the head of a young woman, presumably of French extraction. Engineering students sported battery-powered alcohol distribution machines they'd designed. Rob, as ever, wore his skully over his cornrows. As the Class Day speaker, Governor George Pataki—on whose pool table Rob had passed out a year ago—took the stage before the twelve hundred giddy graduates and cracked his first weak joke of the afternoon, Rob hunched over to pack his white clay pipe with a pinch of marijuana and toke (these pipes had been given to us by the school, and we were supposed to break them underfoot at some point, symbolizing . . . something). Some kids around us laughed and asked for a hit; others scowled and said, “That's so disrespectful,” in hissy whispers. Governor Pataki spoke gravely about 9/11, pleading that we not fall victim to ignorant intolerance. “Why did it take the worst
act of terrorism to unite our country?” he asked rhetorically, fifty yards away. Later, our roommate Ty received the award for overall achievement out of the entire Class of '02.

Rob nudged my elbow and pointed to a wizard hat someone sported a few rows ahead, specked with small gold stars, like something Albus Dumbledore might wear for a Hogwarts commencement. He told me that Yale had often felt to him like the famous school for wizards: a place of Gothic spires and dark stone hallways set in another dimension, which granted access to its sorcery and secrets only to these elite few graduating with us right now.

After the ceremony, Rob took Jackie to a cocktail party for parents at the Elihu house. He was excited to show Jackie the place. He'd explained what a secret society was, but the concept had always seemed to elude her: a house set aside exclusively for a dozen college students to drink booze in and share their lives twice a week when they should have been studying. She went with him, nodded her way through the tour, exchanged polite greetings with other students and parents before her lips fell by habit into the straight horizontal line that was neither a smile nor a frown. Red wine and aged whiskey were brought around by hired servers, but she didn't drink.

After the cocktails, most students dined with their families at upscale restaurants like the Chart House and Union League Cafe, or went to Mory's for the “Cups” ritual—gigantic chalices of boozy punches were passed around a group, and whoever finished the last drop spun the chalice upside down on his or her head singing, “It's [drinker's name] who makes the world go round . . .” Rob took Jackie to Jacinta's small apartment a mile up Whalley Avenue. I'd jogged through this downtrodden area often during my time at Yale, because it lay between campus and the track facilities, and I'd always kept my head down and didn't stop. Jacinta lived there, between Whalley and Edgewood, with her teenage son. A week before, Yale's black seniors had had their own graduation ceremony. This took place at the Af-Am House, and each student asked a family member, faculty adviser, or friend to drape a scarf around his or her neck onstage. Rob and Danny Nelson had argued over who would
have Jacinta bestow his scarf, and ultimately Rob had ceded her to Danny, because Danny had worked in the dining hall all four years of college. Rob's scarf was draped by the charismatic poet and sociology professor Derrick Gilbert, whose book of poetry,
HennaMan
, Rob had been obsessed with amid all his science courses. Tonight, Jacinta had a braised pork shoulder on the table. The four of them sat and ate. She and Jackie talked like old girlfriends, and throughout the evening Rob seemed tired but happy, his manner tinged with relief that these four years were over.